LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) – Less than two weeks after signing the virtual rapper known as FN Meka, Capitol Music Group (CMG) and its parent company, Universal Music Group (UMG), has dropped him from their roster after allegations of cultural appropriation and racism.
“Capitol has severed ties with the FN Meka project, effective immediately,” the company said in a statement. “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”.
Activist group Industry Blackout released a statement concerning FN Meka and urged UMG to sever ties with the project and issue an apology.
“This digital effigy is a careless abomination and disrespectful to real people who face real consequences”, it went on. “For example, Gunna, a black artist featured on a song by FN Meka, is currently incarcerated for rapping the same type of lyrics this robot mimics. The difference is, your artificial rapper will not be subjected to federal charges for such”.
Have you lost your FN minds? @capitolrecords @capitolmusic pic.twitter.com/TxbqDhJmv0
— Industry Blackout #IndustryBlackout (@industryblkout) August 23, 2022
A human voices FN Meka, but with lyrics and other creative elements generated through AI software. He is represented as an animated character.
Factory New is the company behind the project, and founder Anthony Martini, claims that the whole thing is actually spearheaded by the human rapper who voices FN Meka and that his company is more akin to a traditional artist manager.
Which means that FN Meka is the creation of “a black guy,… not this malicious plan of white executives”, he tells the New York Times. “It’s literally no different from managing a human artist, except that it’s digital.”
Martini also says that the team behind the project is “actually one of the most diverse teams you can get – I’m the only white person involved.”
He does admit, however, that the initial launch of the project did involve “some trolling,” but he says that they have tried to move away from that, adding: “The question was: How do we break an avatar as if it was a real artist and not a spectacle? It, unfortunately, turned into a spectacle anyway”.
