Kendrick Lamar may have prepped the stage in a major way, but now everyone’s rushing to take a shot at Drake. The latest to join in the hate parade is “First Cut Is The Deepest” singer Sheryl Crow, who had her own pointed words about the rapper’s use of AI technology to add to the party.
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“You cannot bring people back from the dead and believe that they would stand for that,” Crow said in an interview with the BBC. In April, Drake used AI to recreate the voices of Snoop Dogg and the late rapper Tupac Shakur for his song, “Taylor Made Freestyle.” The song was eventually pulled after Tupac’s estate threatened to sue.
“I’m sure Drake thought, ‘Yeah, I shouldn’t do it, but I’ll say sorry later’. But it’s already done, and people will find it even if he takes it down,” Crow continued, emphasizing that the stunt was “hateful” and “antithetical to the life force that exists in all of us.” Elsewhere in the interview, Crow also referred to AI as a “betrayal” and a “slippery slope” that “goes against everything humanity is based on.”
This isn’t the first time Crow has spoken out against AI. Earlier this year, she told The Tonight Show (via Variety), “I did a session the other day and this young songwriter had this incredible song, but she needed a guy to sing on it so that she could pitch it to male singers in Nashville.” She apparently “paid $5, put in John Mayer’s name and she played it for me,” she continued. “There’s no way you could tell the difference and it just blew my mind. And it didn’t just sound like him, I mean, like his inflections.”
“For me, art is like the soul; it’s attached to the soul,” she said, adding that the experience left her feeling “really scared.” “When you get into something that’s so much more advanced than our brains are at this point, it takes the soul out of it, you know, and it’s scary.”
At his celebratory “Pop Out” show recently, Kendrick also changed one of the lyrics to his diss track, “Euphoria,” to more specifically call out Drake’s AI use. “Give me Tupac ring back and I might give you a little respect,” he sang. Maybe we’ll see a Kendrick Lamar/Sheryl Crow collab sometime in the future.