Playboi Carti Gets Lost in the Music

Playboi Carti wears his flows like he wears his clothes: Ensembles designed to wow and confound are tossed to the side with the same zest and vigor that brought them together. The 29-year-old Atlanta rapper’s shifting sound and persona were first cultivated as a member of the Awful Records crew and, later, Harlem’s A$AP Mob. Early works like 2017’s Playboi Carti and 2018’s Die Lit documented the birth of an increasingly bit-crushed mutation of southern hip-hop. Carti became the crown prince of rage rap, which swiped the forbiddingly DIY sonics, ominous iconography, and barely contained aggression from punk and metal. These ideas weren’t foreign to hip-hop — Geto Boys’ records touched most of the same points — but Carti’s eye was always further afield. His persona teetered on a razor’s edge: He must look magisterial but seem nonchalant. Rage, to the extent that the microgenre is distinguished from its fountainheads in trap and emo rap, is about ritual and release. The preening is the point. The screaming is the point. You’re paying for a portion of devil-may-care cool and a semblance of dominion over darkness. The aim is to carefully brandish chaos.

Music does nothing to reconcile any of its conundrums. But nobody showed up for earnestness.

The unpredictability fueling these triumphs is just as often a cause for concern. The tragic crowd-crush at Travis Scott’s Astroworld reinforced how badly a churning mosh pit needs the regulation and structure of the long-standing rock-show tradition. Allegations of violence surrounding high-profile artists — a 2022 domestic-abuse charge levied against Lil Uzi Vert met with a plea of no contest, and a 2023 felony-aggravated-assault charge against Carti was later reported as dismissed — imply that abrasive views on these records come from somewhere real and worrying. Iggy Azalea, mother of Carti’s son, saying “We haven’t heard from that man in … six months” lends disconcerting credibility to rhymes about not giving a shit about women. Scott and Kendrick Lamar, who both guest on Music, offer a thermostat reading for how much the industry even cares about these issues. But this isn’t what irks rage’s older detractors, who grew up loving Dr. Dre and knew the misogyny of 2001 was not the put-on some of the gun talk might’ve been. It’s a fear of debasement of rap’s perceived core values — painstaking originality, lyrical depth and dexterity, distinctive diction — bucking against a bumpy evolution. Purists see the rise of almost defiantly unlaborious music as proof that fast fashion floats, but this wave is kin to everything that came before it. Methodological quibbles aside, the story’s what it always was: Black 20-somethings knowingly strip-mining movements that ripped off and marginalized their grandparents. Music sees one of rage’s head scenesters crashing into orthodoxies and expectations of youth culture as time ticks on.

It’s been a fussy four years since the last Playboi Carti album, 2020’s goblin-infested Whole Lotta Red. Tentpole rage-rap releases like Uzi’s Luv Is Rage and Scott’s Rodeo will turn ten this year, and their authors are cruising into their 30s seeking to bottle and reproduce the old lightning. Uzi’s curt Eternal Atake 2 dragged, as did Scott’s “Hot 100” shooting star “4x4.” While Carti fans pestered him for a follow-up, the vocal theatrics and synth saturation he favors trickled into the topsoil, feeding mainstream rap. You can get pretty close to the signature listening to Ohio’s OsamaSon, Virginia’s Nettspend, New York’s Yung Fazo, Nottingham’s skaiwater, or any of the members of Carti’s own Opium imprint. (The label feels like a Galactus arrangement. Four Atlanta heralds — Destroy Lonely, Ken Carson, and the duo Homixide Gang — wield aspects of their benefactor’s power, priming the planet for conquest.) The shape of Music — 30 songs spanning 76 minutes — feels like an apology for years of false leads and starts to a hungry fandom.

The result is imperfect but instructive. It communicates why, in spite of anyone’s reservations, Carti is a rapper’s rapper. The big guns clearly study him, excitedly adopting the house style. He is a massive inspiration for pitched-up vocals and swarming ad-libs in mainstream hip-hop, though he gets the latter from Jeezy. Those qualities don’t necessarily dominate Music, which is more interested in reveling in the tonal breadth of the voice. Two exceedingly strange noises Playboi Carti makes on the new album are as follows: A long and guttural howl undergirding rousing choir vocals in the gospel-tinged “Crush,” like a demon exorcised in Pentecostal Sunday service. And later, in the deceptively saccharine “Fine Shit,” a crusty, percussive “The money gon’ talk!” interrupting soft crooning, like a lech yelling at the TV as the lead in a rom-com begins to trust a love interest. This is an artist obsessed with the marriage of high- and lowbrow.

Carti is, as oldheads assessed, somewhat enthralled by pissing on tradition. “Crush” takes after a Ye church banger, but the choir is whooping “Shorty gon’ let me crush,” like the Chappelle’s Show skit with the opera singer interpreting Dave’s raunchy thoughts. It’s almost entirely horny buildup, echoing grunts occupying spaces where a series of verses usually goes. (Actual Ye has been pitching a fit about not being featured anywhere, revealing how Carti, a lucrative collaborator on the Donda and Vultures albums, has stormed rap’s upper class to the extent that even the radioactive clout lord wants in on the action.) “Fine” weaponizes the sound and structure of a rap Song for the Ladies, mostly to flex on the riches and influence attracting women. The clean vocals are so slick, and the ad-libs so coarse, that rumors of Carti using an AI model of his own voice are circulating in the fandom. The query speaks to a dilemma: How do you reaffix a stamp on a sound that’s been aggressively copied?

Music regroups the way many works by artists a decade into their careers tend to nowadays: It reaffirms foundations. Sometimes this means cannibalizing aspects of older songs. The video-game-y topline of “Crush” brings to mind a similar sequence in Whole Lotta Red’s “Sky.” But the twist is that the artist’s point of nostalgia sits further back in time than fans looking for another hit of Die Lit. Not content to fully retreat into the self-parodic zoomer nostalgia routines Carti’s rage-elder peers have, Music engages in a jarringly convincing array of impressions. In addition to two songs in which Future appears, there are around a half-dozen Carti performances that sound like him. At first pass, the slurring trunk-rattler “Toxic” conjures the image of the DS2 star rhyming his way through anaphylaxis. “Walk” and “Dis 1 Got it” sell self-destructive chants like Future’s drug jams. But “Charge Dem Hoes a Fee” with actual Nayvadius makes the Carti deep voice all over Music feel small. At the same time, he salutes Lil Wayne on “Like Weezy” and approximates the squawk of mixtape-era Young Thug, while “K Pop” manifests the disinterested drawl of Lil Yachty. Music is saying that Carti can’t be pinned down.

But the familiarity grows oppressive. It hits more like a survey of what the rapper has been up to than a self-certain step forward. For Carti fans, appreciating his unusual gifts comes with an awareness of his foibles, of the erratic release schedules and legal woes that undermine his work. Audience and industry seem relatively nonplussed about this, more concerned with the questions of authenticity raised by tributary vocal delivery. The issue, then, is that Music is a lesser work in the catalogue. The instrument is astounding, but the guy can’t decide what to do with it. Restlessness sources both the most grating and the most intriguing performances. It is a distinguishing trait, impossible to pry off the music like the darkness threading in and out of rage and drill scenes. You couldn’t make Carti take himself as seriously as sticklers for bars desire and get anything half as loony as the crunchy, Ashanti-flipping “Cocaine Nose.” It is similarly unwise to bask in the airs of lawlessness in modern rap without stopping to ponder their real-world ramifications. Music does nothing to reconcile any of its conundrums. But nobody showed up for earnestness. Carti is here to facilitate people ramming into one another. In this objective, he gets his way.