FN Meka was dropped by Capitol Records days after they'd made him the "world's first" AI rapper to sign to a major label, following controversy over his use of the N word and for making light of police brutality. As one of his creators, E.Town Concrete vocalist Anthony Martini explained to Music Business Worldwide, "lyrical content, chords, melody, tempo, sounds, etc" for FN Meka are all determined by artificial intelligence, but he's voiced by a human, and that person, Atlanta-based rapper Kyle the Hooligan, broke his silence on Instagram about his involvement in the project, writing that the creators "Used me for my voice my likeness and the culture got 10million TikTok followers and a Big record deal off what I created then ghosted me… "
"They came to me with this AI shit and was like would I want to be the voice of it, and I thought it was going to be some collaboration," Kyle said. "They promised me equity in the company, percentages, all this stuff, so I’m thinking, ‘OK, this about to be some collab, something different for me, so I can do my music and do some A.I. stuff with this FN Meka character."
"So everything going good," he continued. "Next thing I know, n**** just ghosted me. Use my voice, use my sound, use the culture and literally just left me high and dry. I ain’t get a dime off of nothing, and they got record deals, all this stuff. I wasn’t involved in no meetings or none of that, which is fucked up. So, I’m glad they ass got canceled ‘cause that’s karma for they ass ‘cause God don’t play with me. I’m gonna tell you that right now."
In a second clip, Kyle says that one of FN Meka's songs, "Moonwalkin," is his. "Just to prove to y’all this was my music and me Moonwalking and Internet," he writes.
While he's yet to comment on Kyle's allegations, Martini discussed FN Meka being dropped by Capitol with the New York Times, saying that "blogs that have latched onto a clickbait headline and created this narrative" that led him to anticipate the cancellation. More from New York Times:
[Martini] said that FN Meka was, in fact, primarily an anonymous human rapper — “he’s a Black guy” — and “not this malicious plan of white executives. It’s literally no different from managing a human artist, except that it’s digital.” He added that the team behind FN Meka was “actually one of the most diverse teams you can get — I’m the only white person involved.”
In their statement, Capitol Records wrote, "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."
