An AI rapper co-helmed by E. Town Concrete vocalist Anthony Martini was recently signed by Capitol Records and dropped by the label roughly a week later amid controversy. Outside of sporadic shows fronting the aforementioned New Jersey rap metalcore outfit, Martini has been spending his time behind the scenes in the music industry over the past decade and more. Among the various entries on his resume was a stint at the high profile management company Crush Management.
Several years ago he also went on to co-create the ‘virtual label’ known as Factory New. It was through that venture that the virtual rapper known FN Meka was born, with brothers Chris and Brandon Le said to be behind the AI driven virtual artist.
The controversy surrounding the digitally created artist began to surface after its August 14th signing was announced. It was pointed out that past FN Meka material utilized racial slurs (the n-word), which while not entirely uncommon in the rap world (Martini himself has used the word in his past lyrics with E. Town Concrete as well), was not particularly well-received when the ethnicities of the AI rapper’s co-creators was brought to light.
A statement newly issued by Capitol Music regarding the controversy and their decision to drop FN Meka reads as follows:
“CMG has severed ties with the FN Meka project, effective immediately. We offer our deepest apologies to the Black community for our insensitivity in signing this project without asking enough questions about equity and the creative process behind it. We thank those who have reached out to us with constructive feedback in the past couple of days-your input was invaluable as we came to the decision to end our association with the project.”
Since being created around 2019, FN Meka has amassed millions of followers via social media. Speaking in April of last year with Music Business Worldwide, Martini said of the technology used to create the rapper:
“We’ve developed a proprietary AI technology that analyzes certain popular songs of a specified genre and generates recommendation’s for the various elements of song construction: lyrical content, chords, melody, tempo, sounds, etc. We then combine these elements to create the song.
As of now, a human voice performs the vocals, but we are working towards the ability to have a computer come up with and perform its own words – and even collaborate with other computers as ‘co-writers’.”
