By Gary Suarez in Newsletter — Jun 6, 2025

Welcome To 'Tha Carter AI'

Lil Wayne enters his Slop Era with 'Tha Carter VI.'

Mere minutes into Tha Carter VI, something feels amiss. First there's "King Carter," a would-be rock epic intro that opens with a tonally iffy paean to Lil Wayne from an uncredited female voice. Seven years after his mother Jacida Carter's genuinely heartfelt Tha Carter V opener "I Love You Dwayne," this stilted poem sounds suspiciously as if it were generated by a ChatGPT-style prompt, in words as well as voice. The remainder of the otherwise instrumental track moves towards Gladiator grandeur, giving way to "Welcome To Tha Carter."

Anyone familiar with Metro Boomin's mischief-making, AI-generated "BBL Dreezy" from the Drake vs. Kendrick feud might catch a whiff of something similar amid the pseudo-vinyl crackle, generically vintage soul singing, and oddly contemporary lyrics of a track ostensibly intended to convey a sample. All the more frustrating is that, once Weezy gets to rapping, he sounds pretty good on it. Someone with better tech-investigative skills than myself will assuredly get to the bottom of this. But as a music critic with two and a half decades under my belt, I can't help but smell the stench of slop.

It's not surprising, per se, that multi-millionaire Wayne or his cohorts would adopt or experiment with AI, especially given the way it's being used in the marketing rollout for Tha Carter VI. But to apply copyright-infringing, environment-decimating (don't you roll your eyes at me) technology to one of the most heralded franchises in hip-hop history seems fundamentally at odds with the inventive, game-changing nature of everything that preceded it. He was a risk-taker on those prior albums, as well as his other mixtapes and projects, even after personal and professional woes threatened the likelihood of future volumes. This apparent embrace of cheap shortcuts right out the gate on this highly anticipated record doesn't suit someone who calls himself the G.O.A.T., a claim he speaks aloud on closer "Written History."

Though his Tha Carter VI punchlines don't instantly hit the same as his bars used to, I doubt that Wayne has turned to an AI-writing "assistant" to pen his words or, as the artist formerly known as Kanye West is charged with, to some program electronically mimicking his voice. But, 13 years after the Tupac hologram took the Coachella stage, we all know tech is both increasing and normalizing its presence in the music space to an alarming degree. Rappers' Instagram accounts regularly display AI-generated imagery, and it's becoming more and more prevalent in album cover art. (Just today, Memphis trap star Black Youngsta dropped a project called NOOSHAADE with artwork depicting cartoonish versions of himself and a coterie of baddies.) Produced by "AI visuals studio" The Dor Brothers, Snoop Dogg's recent video for "Sophisticated Crippin'" got some minor flack for its unnaturalness, and we should anticipate more of this from lesser artists in due time.

The problem is hardly limited to rap or even to music, but it's a tried-and-true axiom that Black culture drives pop culture. So if it's okay for someone like Lil Wayne to go AI on the track, what's stopping anyone else? There's an entire generation of young would-be artists about to emerge who have been indoctrinated by this technology baked into their favorite apps and cropping up in production tools. If you were mad about mumble rap, get ready for hip-hop's slop era. It's coming sooner than you think.