Hip-Hop for the Infinite Scroll

For years now, one of hip-hop’s most common debates has been: Who is the next Kendrick Lamar? The question reflects eternal anxiety about rap’s future as a storytelling medium. When the now-37-year-old Super Bowl headliner blew up in the early 2010s, he was hailed as a new-school evangelist for old-school lyricism. But hip-hop’s post-Lamar years have seen a surge of interest in—to use an insulting term—“mumble rap”: party music that doesn’t overtly seem writerly and in many cases doesn’t strain to say much at all.

Lamar’s participation in three songs on Playboi Carti’s new album, Music, suggests that the divide between these two approaches might not be as stark as it seems. A 29-year-old Atlanta native, Carti’s music scans as anti-meaning, all muttering and vibes. He’s the undisputed main character of hip-hop for listeners his age and younger, and Music, his first album since 2020, is racking up something close to Taylor Swift–level sales figures. This popularity might seem to reflect all sorts of ready-made concerns about Gen Z’s interest in immediacy over depth. Yet the frequently stunning Music is still, in its way, telling a story suited to its times.

To describe Carti is to describe an absence. He likes to style himself as a vampire—black leather, red contacts—while revealing little of himself online. His concerts are smoke-drenched rituals designed to spur moshing, and his music is all about sensation. His beats have lots of detail but no fixed center, creating rhythms that call to mind choppy waves or a record that’s stuck in a groove. A synth or guitar is always prickling in the background, casting a putrid haze. His rapping has a frail, slithering quality; his vocal tone morphs between cute squeakiness and ragged rottweiler growls. When I listen, I don’t imagine a person performing. Rather, I feel like I myself have been reduced to a pinprick of consciousness that’s bobbing through a dream.

With each release, that dream has gotten darker and denser. Music, Carti’s fourth proper album, is a 30-song chunk of noise. It opens with a riff that sounds like it’s being played by a welding machine, paired with Carti gasping his lyrics as if in agony. The effect is assaultive but clever, jolting listeners’ reflexes and then toying with their attention. Every few seconds of the album, some new provocation hits the ear: Maybe the beat switches, or Carti’s collaborator DJ Swamp Izzo shouts his own name, or a verse stops a few syllables earlier than expected. “Crush” builds up megatons of energy with the help of gospel choirs; “Evil J0rdan” creates a polyrhythmic effect out of what seems to be a ringing phone.

Harsh as these songs are, the slogan “I Am Music”—written on the album cover—works on a few levels. It matches a tattoo that Lil Wayne, a croaky-voiced influence on Carti, has on his face. It’s an assertion of Carti’s eminence in popular music, as attested by the album’s features by hip-hop’s reigning guard: Lamar, Future, Travis Scott, The Weeknd, Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert, Ty Dolla Sign. (Ye has been whining on X about being left off.) It also speaks to Carti’s core competency, the attribute that coheres his chaos: musicality, the ability to create a sense of movement and drama with pure sound.

[Read: The next great American mega-genre]

Musicality, to be clear, is different from songwriting ability. If you focus too closely on any piece of Music, the magic dissipates. Many tracks amount to a quirky beat and a few seconds of vaporous rapping. Lyrically, Carti rambles in a not particularly distinctive, sometimes stomach-turning way about violence and sex. (In 2023, he was arrested for allegedly beating his pregnant girlfriend; his lawyer said the accusations were false.) The guest verses tend to highlight Carti’s deficiencies, though in the case of Lamar, it’s the featured rapper who ends up looking worse: Lamar’s goofy character work seems belabored next to Carti’s antimatter-like presence.

Still, one lyrical theme does tie together Carti’s sound and content, such as it is: drugs. The old standbys of party rap—molly, cocaine, lean—show up again and again. But so does the trendy drug of our time, ketamine, which detaches the user’s subjectivity from their sense of self, making them feel more like an object than a person. Drug-inspired music can be tedious music, like listening to someone describe their own dream, but Carti’s substance obsession is central to his project. This is music about, and that conveys, being high all the time. There’s not a moment of lucid reflection or respite to be found in an hour and 16 minutes of music.

This feeling of being buffeted from one thrill to the next is probably what makes Carti the great rapper of the generation raised on the endless scroll. But he’s not just reproducing the fleeting pleasures of drugs and distractions; the music’s bleak, overwhelming, depersonalizing roar is so rich that it amounts to an art piece about those things. If you let it, Music will plug up your thoughts and deliver you into the churning present, a reality without narrative—and in doing so, tell a tale about how it feels to live right now.