An AI Song Hit Number One For The First Time

The top country song in the US right now is a “song” called “Walk My Walk,” from an “artist” called Breaking Rust. And Breaking Rust and all its music are all entirely AI-generated.

The song is a pretty obvious AI generation. The tells being that the singer doesn’t breathe at any point and the bass line doesn’t make any sense, switching from root notes to chords to weird 808 hits for no real reason. As I have written before, AI doesn’t really seem to understand the point of a bass guitar — much like the rest of the music world, sadly.

There isn’t much known about the human behind Breaking Rust, but all of its songs are credited to an Aubierre Taylor, who goes by the username @kaysonistic on TikTok. According to some digging from music writer Kyle Meredith, the accounts behind Breaking Rust were working on a sillier AI country project called Defbeatsai, which were all country songs about having sex. And Garbage Day researcher Adam Bumas discovered the Defbeatsai account was started by a TikTok user called @emma.pubz. Go deep enough down this rabbit hole and quickly realize all these users are just ripping each other off, making it impossible to figure out who is doing what.

Breaking Rust’s success on the Billboard charts this month is pretty shocking. As Holler Country wrote, “At the time of writing, ‘Walk My Walk’ is No. 1 on Billboard's Digital Song Sales chart. Just to put that in context, Zach Bryan, Lainey Wilson, and Riley Green — three of the biggest names in modern country — have never topped this ranking.”

Breaking Rust is also currently at number two on Spotify’s Viral 50 playlist. Interestingly enough, a user in the subreddit for music AI program Suno, recognized the prompt that’s likely powering Breaking Rust. If you want to generate more chart-topping country songs with the same prompt, you can do that here. Though, the entire Breaking Rust project probably makes the most sense as a short-form video project, rather actual music.

The TikTok channel and Instagram page for Breaking Rust are full of identical sounding pop country songs paired with dramatic AI-generated footage of a sad cowboy doing sad cowboy stuff, like walking down a highway median, walking around a burned down shack, and using a payphone. And the comments underneath all of these videos are incredibly positive. I even found a few people doing lip sync videos to Breaking Rust songs.

Now, there is an obvious joke you could make here about country music fans being the exact demographic that wouldn’t know or care that a machine is randomly assembling the songs they’re listening to. As one Reddit commenter wrote, “Country music is perfect for AI. Every song sounds the same.”

Even funnier, Suno’s subreddit is full of other very bitter AI “musicians” complaining about how low quality and crappy Breaking Rust is and how it shouldn’t be as popular as it is. Huh! Maybe they’re real musicians after all! Sour grapes aside, I do think Breaking Rust is a good test case for what people will and will not tolerate in terms of generative AI, though.

This week Coca-Cola got dogpiled by users after releasing an AI-generated Christmas ad and the popular Basin Creek Retirement TikTok saw its engagement fall off a cliff after users discovered all the videos were AI. But the same immediate revulsion has not been seen in the world of AI music — for the most part. For instance, no one really talks about the fact that Metro Boomin’s beat for Kendrick Lamar’s “BBL Drizzy” features an AI-generated sample. Likewise Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter VI features all kinds of AI sampling and that didn’t really seem to bother people. (Though, to be fair, there was a lot to dislike about that album without having to even mention the AI.) There was a lot of handwringing after music writers discovered that Spotify was promoting an AI-generated band, The Velvet Sundown, but they still have about 200,000 people listening to them every month. And to come back to a data point we’ve shared a few times recently, the fastest growing accounts on YouTube right now — ones growing even faster than MrBeast — are almost all AI-generated music channels. The biggest of which, Masters of Prophecy, currently has nearly 40 million subscribers.

You, personally, may loathe AI music, but based on every metric we currently have for measuring sentiment, most people do not seem to care. Which is exactly what big streaming platforms are banking on.

As we wrote last week, Spotify’s top charts rarely reflect active listening. Month to month, the top songs on the platform are mostly just a few large pop — and K-Pop — acts getting shuffled around a bit. Most of the action, so to speak, is happening on downstream platforms like Patreon, X, and TikTok, where fans are generating any semblance of what we once called “buzz.” And it doesn’t seem like an accident that AI acts, without active fanbases, are popping up right when fans are becoming stars and media institutions themselves. What is Pop Crave if not a stan account turned pro? The dream of AI content, the reason music conglomerates like Universal Music Group are partnering with music AI platforms like Udio, is not just a music industry where you no longer have to deal with pesky musicians and their “creative vision,” but one without vocal fans, as well. And it sure is convenient to have a new hit country song built by a robot, rather than a human being that can get fed into the online discourse machine. Finally, an un-Pop-Crave-able pop star.

The Sound Of X

If you know what this thumbnail sounds like without pressing play you gotta go outside, man.

Hasan Goes To China

Libs, China Hawks, and, you know, anyone that acknowledges the still very much ongoing Uyghur genocide are real mad about leftist streamer Hasan Piker’s current trip to China. And, for once, people aren’t being exactly unreasonable about something Piker is up to. He’s currently streaming around Beijing and has already had a few awkward run-ins with the Chinese Communist Party. He was briefly detained by police while streaming live in Tiananmen Square. And he mentioned that someone “walked in” to his hotel room. Likely a hotel employee, but, also, it’s not impossible that it was a government handler either.

I’ve written before about the intense security protocol I was under while traveling in China in 2019. I also know of at least one western reporter that accidentally left his work laptop in his hotel room and his editor decided it was safer to just microwave it rather than ever let it connect to Wi-Fi back in the newsroom.

That’s not to say that there are plenty of things Americans can — and should — learn about life on the other side of The Great Firewall. But a streamer like Piker, who exists in the uniquely American gray space of news and entertainment, is going to have a much tougher time navigating Chinese regulations than someone like IShowSpeed — who wrapped up a livestreamed China tour earlier this year.

One Of The All In Guys Invested In MrBeast’s Lunchly

Here’s an interesting little tidbit! All In host and reactionary venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya showed up in a court filing last week related to the $100 million Beast Burger lawsuit. Basically, Beast Burger imploded over the use of ghost kitchens and the whole thing is slowly making its way through the courts.

Spotted by journalist Steven Asarch, who shared a screenshot on X, Palihapitiya emailed Jimmy Donaldson in 2024 after he started getting negative feedback on a tweet promoting Donaldson’s Lunchables knockoff, Lunchly.

Best as I can tell, it was not widely known that Palihapitiya was investing in MrBeast. In fact, the only reference I could find to Palihapitiya having ties to MrBeast was a callout post from YouTuber Rosanna Pansino in 2024. Pansino has had her own years-long feud with Donaldson and was claiming last year that he had “secret billionaire investors,” and tagged Palihapitiya in the post. Well, it turns out that, yes, the MrBeast project is not nearly as organic as we thought it was. Shocking!

The Memetic Terrarium

X user @nearcyan argued this week that we should have a term for the phenomenon where an internet user basically makes up a thing to get freaked out about. Best summarized by artist Sako Asko’s cardboard monsters cartoon from 2020.

“We have doomscrolling as a verb and nouns like echo chamber and rabbit hole, but no good term to refer to the 'entire environment' that someone quite-online has constructed for themselves,” @nearcyan wrote.

Another user in their replies suggested, “memetic terrarium,” which is way too dense to catch on, but still pretty fun! Anyone got a better term for this? Let me know! We’ll start using it in Garbage Day lol.

Joyce Carol Oates Ethered Elon Musk

Author Joyce Carol Oates wrote on X this week that Elon Musk was “uneducated, uncultured” and that he “never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates — scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history.” Brutal.

Musk knew better than to attack Oates head on and instead wrote to a random user, “Eating a bag of sawdust would be vastly more enjoyable than reading the laboriously pretentious drivel of Oates.” Following that up with, “Oates is a lazy liar and … an abuser of semicolons!” Which he certainly ripped from the top of Google’s AI search summary.

Oates then went back for seconds, writing, “‘Wherever he goes, he wants to leave’ — that's because when he gets there, he has brought his own self along; and whatever club he's invited to join has been devalued by the invitation.” (She does use a lot of semicolons, jeez.)

The TikTok Meat Guy Is Not The Owner Of The Smokehouse He Works At

A few TikTok users are accusing Destination Smokehouse of false advertising after people discovered Walter Johnson, the man in all the viral videos, doesn’t own the restaurant. Making things even thornier, Nick Yepremian, the smokehouse’s actual owner, is white, while Johnson is black.

Now, just to be clear, Yepremian is pretty open about being the pit master of Destination Smokehouse… at least on YouTube. Johnson, another pit master at the smokehouse, didn’t become the main character of the restaurant’s TikTok account until around 2023-2024. Now Johnson is the de facto the face of Destination and many people just assumed he was the owner.

There is obviously a racial component to all of this. Questions worth asking about a white business owner featuring an older black man as his social media spokesperson. Black activists and writers have been complaining about various forms of “digital blackface” for years. And TikTok has exacerbated a lot of these issues. But I also think this is a fascinating glimpse at how reticent TikTok users are to leave the app’s ecosystem.

Like I said, Yepremian hasn’t hidden that he owns the restaurant. His name is on the website. But TikTok, by design, compresses all context into single videos. And we’ve seen countless examples of users feeling duped or lied to once they leave the algorithmic bubble. A complicated environment for brands to be swimming in, for sure.

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Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s some beautiful famous last words.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***