When I first heard “Versace,” the 2013 breakout single by the Atlanta trio Migos, it was like seeing a rainbow for the first time. The hook is just Quavo saying the word “Versace” over and over, saccadic and uninterrupted: “Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace!” It’s not the repetition of the designer name itself that gives the song gravitas but how Quavo and his bandmates, Offset and Takeoff, accent and manipulate the word into eighth-note triplets. They didn’t invent this style of vocal performance, but they did revolutionize its use in hip-hop and popular music, with everyone from Taylor Swift to Ariana Grande adopting iterations of what came to be known simply as the “Migos flow.” In the years following “Versace,” the group notched two No. 1 albums, tied a Beatles chart record, and set off multiple online trends. They popularized the Dab, a dance that became so culturally inescapable that Hillary Clinton, when campaigning for the Presidency, in 2016, did it during a guest appearance on “Ellen”—effectively killing the craze on the spot. Their hit “Bad and Boujee,” from the same year, became one of the defining songs of the decade. As the critic Meaghan Garvey wrote for Pitchfork, in 2018, Migos had “officially infiltrated the mainstream without going pop; instead, pop had gone Migos.” Even after years of creative stagnation, a hiatus, and, tragically, the death of Takeoff, in 2022, Migos had already cemented themselves as cultural icons perennially synonymous with everything cool. Others could imitate but never replicate; their coolness was predicated on their originality.
Imitation, of course, once precluded becoming—a distinction that has dissolved in the age of A.I.-generated deepfakes. In the not-so-distant past, people could dress like Quavo, do the Dab like Offset, or mimic Takeoff’s ad-libs (“Mama!”), but they could not inhabit their movements or voices, could not imagine themselves into their bodies. Now, with the help of A.I., people are doing far more than imagining: in a recent viral trend, users have begun to digitally transplant themselves—and their favorite television characters, celebrities, athletes, politicians, and pets—onto Quavo and Takeoff in a studio performance of their 2022 song “Hotel Lobby.” The original video, which aired on the YouTube series “A Colors Show,” features the duo standing before a bright-orange backdrop, positioned on either side of a dangling microphone. They perform a series of nonchalant dance moves while rapping about diamonds and drugs and experiencing the world in technicolor clarity. But, as it turns out, if you replace Quavo and Takeoff with literally anyone, or anything, the stand-ins manage to channel the same powerful aura as their originators, even if, in real life, they could never dream of achieving such coolness. The tech C.E.O.s Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, two of the more physically awkward and swagless people in public life, suddenly seem loose and inspired when superimposed into the “Hotel Lobby” video; Donald Trump and Elon Musk, hardly known for their fluidity of movement, also assume an effortless cool when becoming Quavo and Takeoff. Deepfakes are controversial, sinister even, given their ability to be used for misinformation or sexual exploitation. But these rapping deepfakes are openly satirical and seemingly inane—is there really any harm in chuckling along with their absurdity?
And people do seem to be chuckling along. After the popularity of the “Hotel Lobby” meme, the deepfakers have turned their attention to the music video for Drake’s “Burning Bridges,” which shows the Canadian rapper and his friends in the back room of a dimly lit restaurant, grinning and staggering around, pointing at the camera and clinking their freshly topped-off shot glasses. Dressed in a black leather headband and jacket, Drake playfully mimes his lyrics: covering his face with his hands, grabbing his chain, swaying about with his arms around his pals. Unlike Migos, Drake has often been accused of trend-hopping, rather than trend-setting, a “culture vulture” who adapts regional sounds and styles for personal gain. (This critique, aggressively weaponized by Kendrick Lamar in diss songs such as “Not Like Us,” tends to be a bit overstated—much of pop music now sounds the way it does because of Drake’s curatorial trailblazing.) But the video’s unmistakable radiance—its delectable sense of place and community, its humor and bluster—has become fodder for a seemingly endless trove of memes that present, for example, the cast of “The Sopranos,” the New York Knicks’ starting five, or any ordinary group of friends as Drake and his buddies: turned up in a restaurant, mean-mugging the camera, slicker and more confident than anyone has any right to be. How novel, and exciting, it must be for the random internet user to consign familiar characters to a rap video, a venue that, until very recently, had a fairly obvious barrier of entry: you had to be the one doing the performance, whether as karaoke or as an original routine. The deepfake meme has removed that barrier. Anyone can now become Drake or Quavo or Kanye West. (A.I.-generated spoofs of West with his Sunday Service choir are the latest rap videos to go viral.) Are you laughing yet?