Hatcher started creating music with AI only a few months prior to “BBL Drizzy,” but he’s no novice. Based in New York, the 40-year-old Floridian has been in the content creator trenches for nearly two decades. His first viral hit came during a long-ago epoch of the internet, a 2007 Soulja Boy parody called “Crank That Homeless Man.”
“I definitely put in my 10,000 hours just making comedy music,” Hatcher says. Eventually he moved on from parody and began writing original songs, such as the 2010 sleazy electro-rap hit “I Got It at Ross.” By 2020, he was working as a club comedian and pursuing a career in television screenwriting—two career paths that hit major roadblocks due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the writers’ strike.
When Hollywood writers took to the picket lines in the spring of 2023, at least in part to defend themselves against the encroaching danger of AI, Hatcher wanted to get ahead of it. He began experimenting with some of the generative AI tools his fellow writers were worried about. ChatGPT, Sora, and Midjourney—he learned his way around the language of prompting through constant practice and experimentation, producing AI short films and movie trailers for imagined franchises. Eventually he came across Suno and Udio, which—like the text and image tools he’d been using—allowed him to generate music by inputting natural language prompts.
Song parodies and comedic music had always been his bread and butter, but he quickly found that AI tools supercharged his ability to release timely, high-quality songs, often based on top trends on X or Instagram. As the Kendrick–Drake beef moved at the speed of social media, with explosions of memes and commentary rocketing around the platforms, Hatcher was able to jump right in and participate with something a little more fully-formed than just another tweet.
“Whatever’s trending, that’s what I like to create songs about,” Hatcher says. His long-honed comedy talent helped him whip up a concept, but it was his more recently developed facility with Udio and Midjourney that let him turn around “BBL Drizzy” in, he says, about five minutes after writing the lyrics.
A driving bassline, reminiscent of the Wrecking Crew, supports a soulful vocal, and the end result is something almost indistinguishable from a classic Motown single. For unclear reasons, AI tools are particularly good at generating music that sounds like 1960s and ’70s soul and R&B—which just happens to be the preferred sample base of hip-hop producers.
