Lupe Fiasco is working with MIT on an FM radio station. But there’s a catch: the project will be driven entirely by artificial intelligence.
The Chicago rapper-turned-professor announced the news on Instagram last week with a lengthy caption that read, in part: “Imagine if there was a 24-hour fully AI-powered radio station. My complex rap skills were trained and carefully refined to produce the highest quality Lupe Fiasco song possible. Now imagine it playing the generated song only once and not playing it again endlessly… Now imagine that. , the radio station is only available during certain times and only in certain locations, and you need an actual FM radio to listen to the songs. Imagine I put together a team at MIT and imagine we actually built it. …..
“ENDLESS LUP coming soon,” he concluded in the caption.
Lupe has been working with the prestigious school since 2022, when MIT hired him to teach a course in rap theory and practice as part of the MLK Visiting Professor and Scholars Program for the 2022-23 academic year. This isn’t the only higher education institution he’s involved with: Fiasco was named a Saybrook Associate Fellow at Yale University in 2023 and recently announced that he will join the Johns Hopkins University Peabody Institute as a visiting professor to teach rap classes to students . Their new hip-hop music bachelor’s degree program.
Fiasco also announced a new multimedia venture in the same IG post about his work with MIT. “RhymenShop is my multimodal/multimedia creative music sandbox,” he wrote. “RhymenShop’s ‘DCS’ or ‘Data Compression Service’ plans are small-volume physical music releases or ‘flavors’ available only to holders of RhymenShop DCS USB cards or ‘bowls’.”
He mentioned that the launch of RhymenShop technically began during last fall’s Samurai Tour, with more details to come.
