Tyga is making history with his new album.
This week, $TARFACE, the Decaydance Records alum’s ninth studio album, earned a scathingly crafted Pitchfork assessment from Drew Millard that now stands as the publication’s first zero-star review in nearly two decades.
To be clear, this means the album, which has been confirmed by Tyga himself to have incorporated AI, earned exactly zero stars. None. Zilch. Nada. Bupkis.
$TARFACE, to quote Millard’s review, is a “piece of shit” that “places the listener in their own personal [David] Cronenberg film.” To boot, it’s also “smug and complacent,” thus landing it squarely in zero-star territory.
“All I can say is: Tyga, you really earned it,” Millard later added in an X post.
At the time of this writing, Tyga does not appear to have publicly addressed having given Pitchfork an opportunity to dole out this rare dishonor.
In a recent interview with VIBE’s Mikey Fresh, Tyga conceded that he and his team “definitely used” AI on the album, further arguing, albeit erroneously, that such programs are akin to Auto-Tune.
Alternatively, many artists have taken a defiant stance against generative AI’s infiltration of the industry, SZA among them. Upon learning in June that hundreds of her songs had been used to train AI models, the seven-time Grammy winner called any musician who supports “degenerate shit” of this variety “disgusting.”
“There’s nothing you could ever say to me to make this okay,” she added at the time.
