Metro Boomin

Leland Tyler Wayne (born 1993 in St. Louis), known as Metro Boomin, is the defining hip-hop producer of his generation — the architect behind hits for Future, 21 Savage, and Travis Scott, the “Heroes & Villains” album, and the “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” soundtrack.

The first great AI sample

During the Drake–Kendrick feud in May 2024, Metro — feuding with Drake himself — released “BBL DRIZZY BPM 150.mp3,” a free diss beat built around “BBL Drizzy,” a soul-parody song that comedian King Willonius had generated with the AI music tool Udio a few weeks earlier. Metro tweeted an open challenge — “Best verse over this gets a free beat” — then sweetened it to $10,000, and TikTok flooded with entries.

Billboard declared the track “the future of AI sampling”: a superstar producer treating a machine-generated vocal as raw material, exactly as producers have long treated dusty soul records. Willonius pushed back on the idea that AI deserved the writing credit — “There’s no way AI could write lyrics like ‘I’m thicker than a Snicker,’” he told Billboard — underscoring that the joke, the prompt, and the concept were human. In a final twist, Drake himself later rapped over the beat on Sexyy Red’s “U My Everything.”

Metro has never positioned himself as an AI advocate — by some accounts he did not even realize the sample was AI-generated when he flipped it — but the episode made him the unwitting proof of concept that generative audio can slot straight into hip-hop’s oldest tradition: hearing something in the culture and flipping it into a hit.