Marvin Young, better known as the rapper Young MC, burst into the mainstream from his college dorm room with the 1989 megahit "Bust A Move." While his classmates studied at the library, he was onstage at the 32nd Annual Grammy Awards, taking home the first televised Grammy for Best Rap Performance at the age of 22. Today, the 57-year-old rapper is reentering the fold with a modern sound—and he's brought a new friend with him.
Since last June, Young has released three new singles: "Loose," "Fun Part" and December's "Kinetic"—all under his Disco Theory label. "Fun Part" debuted at No. 38 on Billboard's Rhythmic Airplay chart, bringing Young MC back to the charts for the first time since 2002's "Heatseeker."
Each of these new tracks feature Young's typical multisyllabic rhyming schemes, arranged in series of four to eight-line couplets; however, what listeners might be surprised by is the introduction of Young's new cyber hype man. Or hype … bot?
"Disco Teresa," as Young calls it, is an AI-generated voice that accompanies him across his new singles, often introducing the label tag and even serving as a call-and-response partner to Young's rhymes.
"She's like the label mascot for Disco Theory," Young told Newsweek over Zoom from his home in Arizona. "My thought process was, if you took a producer tag or a label tag that people have in their production or in their music and you fully animated it and were able to have a conversation with it, where it was actually reacting to what's happening in the song, how would that sound?"
Having Fun With It
You can see Disco Teresa in the music video for "Fun Part"—which Young shot in Phoenix. Depicted as a mannequin-like figure with wires and cables subbed for a spine and shoulder joints (think Sonny from I, Robot meets crash-test dummy), Disco Teresa chimes in between Young's bars in a robotic tone.
"The funny part is there's a setting in the program where I could make the voice sound more human or make it sound conversational," Young said. "I purposely stayed away from that because I wanted it to sound somewhat mechanical so that I could perform around it and have Teresa play the role of just being information or reaction."
But Young's use of artificial intelligence doesn't stop there. Almost all the cars seen in the "Fun Part" music video were AI generated, Young said, images generated by a designer in Florida that were then interspersed within the live footage.
"People shy away from AI altogether, or they say, 'Oh, I want AI to write my songs for me.' I'm well in-between that," Young told Newsweek. "I'm still writing the songs, still doing the creativity, still being me. But that kind of technology—being able to use it mid-level in comparison to what some other people do—I think it's fun."
"I don't feel like I'm losing myself," he added. "Like, my ego isn't too big where I can't have the AI character join me on the records."
'I'm Making Some of the Best Music of My Life'
Though his recent singles embody his most consistent release of new music since his last album, 2008's "Relentless," Young has been performing his discography for years. Whether he's sharing the stage with artists like Vanilla Ice and Montell Jordan (who officiated his wedding last year) as part of the I Love the 90s Tour or playing his hits at music festivals across the country, Young credits his live performance as the key to his career over the last decade.
"You get about five to seven minutes to do 'Bust A Move' and the stuff that they know, and then you have another five to 10 minutes to do stuff that you want or performs well. So I find myself performing music that has been good for me onstage, but might not be the most popular stuff," Young told Newsweek. "I thought to myself after a while, I was like, 'Oh, man, if I had some new music that people would know from other places, it'd be cool to put that with 'Bust A Move' in my show.''
With his new music hitting the airwaves and more shows lined up in the coming months, Young is excited about the future—taking in feedback from his recent singles and performances to better inform his next steps in his music creation.
Will he drop a new album this year? He says he doesn't know for sure. But he's riding the wave and enjoying the process along the way.
"I honestly feel at this age, I'm making some of the best music of my life because I'm informed and I'm still able to execute the plan better than I ever thought," Young said. "I want to take people to a fun place—a happy place—with the music I make."