A song about immigrants whose music, vocals and artwork were entirely generated using artificial intelligence has made the Top 50 most listened to songs in Germany, in what may be a first for a leading music market.
Verknallt in einen Talahon is a parody song that weaves modern lyrics – many of them based around racial stereotypes about immigrants – with 60s schlager pop.
The song is No 48 in Germany, the world’s fourth largest music market. Less than a month after its release, the song has 3.5m streams on Spotify and is No 3 on the streaming platform’s global viral chart.
Its creator, Josua Waghubinger, who goes by the artist name Butterbro, said he made the song’s chorus by feeding his own lyrics into Udio, a generative artificial intelligence tool that can generate vocals and instrumentation from simple text prompts.
He used the music tool to add a verse after the chorus had gained a favourable response on TikTok. “I think there’s still enough creative freedom in the song to make it a creative project,” the IT professional and hobby musician told Die Klangküche (The Sound Kitchen), a German music production podcast.
The song has drawn attention in German media not only for the production technology used but also its lyrical content. Translating as In Love with a Talahon, the song references a Germanised version of the Arabic expression “taeal huna”, meaning “come here” but now commonly used in Germany to describe groups of young men with immigrant backgrounds, often with derogatory overtones.
The lyrics parody the classic “good girl falls for bad boy” storylines of songs of the 1960s, such as the Shangri-Las’ Leader of the Pack. The object of the AI-generated singer’s desire wears “a Louis belt, a Gucci bag and Air Max trainers” and “smells like an entire perfume shop”.
When her lover gets angry, she ponders, “he’s as sweet as baklava” – presumably an attempt to identify him with Turkish culture.
Waghubinger said he wanted to make a song that made fun of overtly macho behaviour “with a twinkle in the eye and without discriminating”, but added that his overriding motivation had been to produce a track that would go viral on social media. “That was the challenge I set myself,” he told Die Klangküche.
But Marie-Luise Goldmann, culture editor of conservative broadsheet Die Welt, said the song walked a fine line between parody and discrimination.
“The mixing of migrant youth culture with German schlager conservatism alone will thrill as many listeners as it offends,” she said. “The talahon [in the song] doesn’t hide his backward gender image but it’s debatable whether he [Butterbro] is trivialising, glorifying or attacking it.”
Felicia Aghaye, a writer for the music magazine Diffus, called the song’s popularity “doubly problematic” because “talahon” was firmly established as an insult among young Germans and Austrians against migrants.
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“Rightwing groups, for example, use the term to create a bogeyman and stoke Islamophobia and xenophobia,” she said. “What’s problematic is that Butterbro doesn’t seem to understand the negative issues around the term.
“His track is to a certain extent aiding and abetting making the term mainstream.”
Numerous AI-generated songs in a similar style, mixing the sweet sound of MOR schlager pop from the 1960s with crudely sexualised lyrics, are circulating on German social media.
Artificial intelligence is being increasingly used by music producers to generate vocals in the style of well-known singers. In 2023 the Beatles released Now and Then, a track that used the assistance of AI to extrapolate John Lennon’s vocals.
A track featuring an AI-generated version of Tupac Shakur’s voice was uploaded on Canadian rapper Drake’s Instagram account in April, but disappeared after lawyers for the late rapper reportedly threatened to sue.