Willonius Hatcher

This summer, as Kendrick Lamar and Drake fired vicious disses back and forth, an unlikely third party ended up creating one of the defining songs of the high-profile rap feud. King Willonius, a little-known New York-based comedian, used AI tools to create “BBL Drizzy,” a pristine soul song that seemed to be unearthed from the 1970s and whose lyrics lightly mocked Drake. Thousands of people then recorded their own remixes, rap verses, guitar solos, or dances over Willonius’s track, sharing them on platforms like TikTok.

For King Willonius—whose real name is Will Hatcher—the success of “BBL Drizzy” served as the gratifying payoff for months of experimentation with AI tools. In 2023, Hatcher was trying to make it as a comedy writer in Los Angeles when the writers strike began, snuffing out the pitch meetings he had lined up with agents and managers. To fill his time and to challenge himself, Hatcher began playing with AI tools for more than eight hours a day: creating movie trailers with Runway, fanciful images with MidJourney, pitch decks with ChatGPT and new songs with Udio and Suno. “Everything unlocked for me: It felt like I now had the resources to create anything I could imagine,” Hatcher tells TIME. 

Since then, Hatcher has created irreverent and absurdist content at “warp speed,” including an epic trailer for his Afrofuturist sci-fi movie concept “The Lickback Renaissance” and a soul song based on a Kamala Harris soundbyte. For “BBL Drizzy,” Hatcher plugged comedic lyrics about Drake into the AI program Udio, creating more than a hundred different versions in various genres, including gospel, yacht rock and K-pop. “I’ve done traditional music recording, but this process is the most fun I’ve ever had,” he says. “You don’t need a bunch of different people in order to just make something dynamic—and that's really empowering for an introvert.” 

Crucially, Hatcher believes that these AI tools could be a boon for Black creators and other groups of people who are unrepresented onscreen and have never had the resources to match their ambitions. “It's something empowering when you see somebody like yourself or somebody from your community do great things,” he says. “I want to make things that make people dream bigger.” 

Hatcher’s use of AI has already sent him to a new level of notoriety and opportunity. He recently interviewed Will Smith at a TV premiere, and Drake himself recorded a verse over the “BBL Drizzy” sample—perceived as an attempt to reclaim the narrative. Next, Hatcher says he will premiere a BBL Drizzy musical at Art Basel Miami this winter, with AI-aided visuals and music. Hatcher isn’t the only creator to achieve popularity with an AI-generated song. In Germany, an artist called Butterbro recently made it to the German top 50 chart with a song that has AI-generated lyrics containing racial stereotypes about immigrants. 

Hatcher understands the fear and hatred of AI in artistic communities. But he likens its rise to that of music software like Pro Tools. “You probably had certain people that were like, ‘You need an orchestra,’” he says. “But it’s like, no: I just want to press buttons and make sounds.”