Latest news with #PlayboiCarti
Forbes
9 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
Morgan Wallen Matches Taylor Swift's Historic Chart Feat
Morgan Wallen is the king of the Hot 100 this week. No matter how one looks at the numbers, the country superstar dominates the ranking of the most popular songs in the United States, with dozens of tracks taken from his new No. 1 album, I'm the Problem. As his deluge of music arrives, the singer-songwriter matches a feat only one other artist in American history has accomplished. Wallen fills 37 spots on the Hot 100 this frame. That's a new all-time record for the most real estate ever claimed by a single artist on the list at one time. He bests his own previously-set mark of 36 wins on the Hot 100, which he managed during one frame in March 2023. Wallen is now only the second musical act in the history of the Billboard charts to claim 30 wins on the Hot 100 simultaneously on more than one occasion. He joins Taylor Swift in this incredible feat. Swift filled 30-plus positions on the Hot 100 in back-to-back weeks just a year ago. When her new album The Tortured Poets Department arrived, she claimed 32 slots on the tally. During the following frame dated May 11, 2024, just one cut dropped off the list. Only one other artist has scored 30 or more Hot 100 hits at one time — and amazingly, he did so just a few months ago. Playboi Carti landed 31 simultaneous smashes in late March, thanks to the massive debut of his album Music. In addition to conquering the Hot 100 by breaking the all-time record for the greatest number of hits at one time, Wallen also leads the charge again. He and Tate McRae debut their collaboration "What I Want" — the latest single from I'm the Problem — at No. 1. The country superstar also fills the next two highest slots, as "Just in Case" and "I'm the Problem" rise to Nos. 2 and 3, respectively, with the former hitting a new peak. Wallen scores half a dozen top 10s this week, which is also a first for him and an incredibly rare showing for any musician.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ye And YoungBoy Never Broke Again Link Up For New Single 'Alive'
The only thing comparable to Ye's frequent controversial statements has been his sporadic music releases. The artist formerly known as Kanye West linked up with YoungBoy Never Broke Again this week for their new single 'Alive.' The track initially follows his recent string of unconventional releases, as it was not available on traditional streaming platforms. Instead, fans could only listen via a post on his Instagram account on Wednesday (May 21) or the several audio rips floating around the internet. On Thursday morning (May 22), he shared an Apple Music link for the record on X. 'This that ni**as been stealin' the swag, they know damn well they ain't invent/ This that ni**as ain't rich, they broke, want a blessing and they ain't even repent,' he raps to open the chaotic track. It is devoid of drums and snares production-wise, and rather loaded with rough, white noise-esque synths. 'I'll put the bi**h on and blick 'em, them youngins gon' load up and get 'em, they catch em and stretch 'em/ .223, it ain't missin' a beat, we gon' pray up to Heaven and step in eleven,' YoungBoy belts in his verse. Notably, the record samples DJ Swamp Izzo's 'Alive,' which was also recently flipped by Playboi Carti on 'Crank' from his latest album, Music. The 'Alive' sample is an interesting detail given Ye and Playboi Carti's current relationship, or lack thereof. The Chicago producer has frequently expressed his disdain for the enigmatic rapper ever since he was left off of the recent LP while Kendrick Lamar got three separate features. Things got even deeper when he learned that Carti had been trying to work on a song with his daughter North, and Kim Kardashian seemed willing to let it happen despite taking issue with Ye putting her on a song with Diddy. In an act of pettiness, the 'Timeless' artist shared his version of 'Alive' featuring YoungBoy Never Broke Again without the multi-time Grammy winner. In a now-deleted post on his Opium account, he wrote, 'DIS MY SONG LIL BRA @ye.' The record was accompanied by a full music video, which may mean that West had underhandedly tried to beat Carti to the punch and put out his version first. Ye's 'Alive' follows his controversial 'Heil Hitler,' which has been removed from X and Soundcloud seemingly due to its problematic content. He has also teased his forthcoming record 'Cousins,' where he opens up about sexual activity with a relative, along with his upcoming album Cuck. More from Kai Cenat Irritated By Fan Crashing AMAs Livestream To Praise Ye Playboi Carti Calls Out Ye For Sampling Song Without His Permission Ye Asks For God's "Forgiveness," Says He's Done With Antisemitism
Hypebeast
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
Playboi Carti: Behind the "MUSIC"
When the people at Hypebeast asked me to write an essay on Playboi Carti and explained that it would run opposite a series of original photos, the notion that there would be new portraits of the nearly skeletal 29-year-old auteur draped in fabrics sure to be billowy, expertly chosen, and astronomically expensive was almost unbelievable. For someone whose influence is so ubiquitous, Carti himself is strangely scarce. Few musicians have his interest in or eye for fashion; fewer still can tweak and twist their bodies in such a way that can seem at turns vampiric or downright pellucid. And, somehow, it seems odd that we would be able to capture an image of the man at all. His white-hot masterpiece, Whole Lotta Red , is without question the defining rap record of the decade so far—the common ancestor for a half-dozen different subgenre offshoots and many more careers. The particular way he conflates ad-libs and main vocal tracks, the de- and reconstruction of language within his verses, even the irrepressible energy he projects in his frequent stage-whisper asides have become a lingua franca for otherwise divergent groups of young rappers all the way from Carti's native Atlanta to the far reaches of Scandinavia. Until now, WLR , released on Christmas of 2020, was his most recent studio LP. Even his smattering of excellent follow-up singles were mostly kept off of digital streaming platforms, leaving vultures to pick at carcasses strewn across YouTube, Soundcloud, and Instagram Live. And so the vacuum was filled by rumors: Carti is in Toronto; he's back home in Atlanta; he's at the top of one of the more serpentine roads in the Hollywood Hills; he's holed up in a cave near Paris like a bat that owns a lot of Rick Owens. Producers hint in interviews that they've been brought in to help him flesh out a new sound, or refine an old one. Release dates for a Whole Lotta Red sequel come and go, come and go. Pre-order links and whispers of tour plans vaporize almost as soon as they appear. A friend summarizes the phenomenon best, posting a picture of a still-standing World Trade Center to his Instagram story with the caption '9/11 if Carti said it was happening.' Then, at once, the wait was over. In the early-morning hours of March 14th, MUSIC (more often referred to by the title Carti had teased, I AM MUSIC ), finally materialized—30 tracks that run more than 75 minutes but do not sprawl so much as move in concentric circles, spending most of their orbit in the half-decade of hip-hop that Carti shaped, then poking, at least intermittently, into the unknown. It's at moments eerily familiar and at others truly alien. MUSIC seems, at the time of this writing, like a pulse that will jab Carti into the true main vein of pop culture: a run supporting The Weeknd on his stadium tour will surely be followed by a swath of solo headlining dates; the merch will be inescapable; the LP will dictate even the parts of summer radio programming that it does not itself comprise. And yet, instead of each new discrete moment of exposure bringing Carti more fully into view, they instead seem to make him more opaque. This is not a file of surveillance videos—imagine instead a stack of transparency sheets from an old overhead projector, slightly askew such that the borders blur and the details grow fuzzy. He's here. He isn't. Carti was born the day 2Pac died: September 13th, 1996. (That this became something of a joke on the rap internet speaks to both the reverence with which fans almost immediately treated Carti and the way real-world tragedy now effortlessly collapses into ones and zeroes.) He was raised in South Atlanta, began uploading tracks to Soundcloud in his early teens, then kicked around the fringes of Awful Records and the A$AP Mob, respectively, before and after a move to New York City. In short order, he was signed to Interscope Records just as the major labels were becoming newly flush with streaming cash. Even then, he was elusive. Fans — young, largely male, hyperfluent in the language and symbology of the internet — clamored for the release of songs that were previewed in vanishingly brief snippets and lived (until Interscope was ready to issue them) under a variety of titles and in wildly unpredictable fidelity, on YouTube and what was left of the old file-sharing networks. Across rap's history, this bureaucratic purgatory has ensnared a shocking amount of great music, held up due to clearance issues, executive apathy, or any number of other factors. Whatever the animating force might have been, for Carti, the ephemerality seemed to become part of the larger project. In the spring of 2017, his debut mixtape — the cover art for which is, aptly, the same photo produced twice over — embraced the sense that a whole style, even a radically new one, could be assembled with what seemed to be the auxiliary elements of old ones. Playboi Carti was led and characterized by 'Magnolia,' the minimal, menacing Pi'erre Bourne-produced single that had long rattled around message boards and Twitter group chats, usually titled some variation of 'Hide It In My Sock.' The song builds tremendous momentum despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that most of the vocals could be mistaken for things Carti would mumble in the booth as he was clearing his throat while preparing to rap in earnest. The self-titled release was followed just a year later by Carti's 'debut' album (a meaningless contractual distinction), Die Lit . This time Bourne handled an even greater share of the production, which helped thread together an array of songs that, without the hint of a shared sonic syntax and such careful sequencing, could otherwise be read as a string of disconnected genre experiments. Like his early collaborator, Lil Uzi Vert, Carti took to describing himself as a rockstar: stage diving on the album cover and making the mosh pits/broader chaos of his live shows not just the organizing logic for his songs, but often their very text. The two-and-a-half years between Die Lit and Whole Lotta Red were defined by a series of leaks, canonized almost immediately by his increasingly cultish fanbase. (There are metrics by which Carti's Yung Nudy collaboration — unfortunately titled 'Pissy Pamper' and never properly released — could be seen as one of the most significant songs of the late 2010s.) Carti's opacity is such that it's unclear whether these leaks caused significant delays and/or wholesale changes in aesthetic direction, or were simply excised from an otherwise static album-in-progress. In any event, the wait for WLR bred comic levels of impatience, only to be rewarded with a staggering work of sonic and emotional dynamics. Doing away with the primary-producer model, Carti roped in a cadre of newcomers, including F1lthy, widely credited as one of rage rap's forefathers. The result is something that sounds, when it isn't so heavy as to bludgeon a skull, like a buzzsaw cutting through a GameBoy Advance. That Christmas, I reviewed WLR for Pitchfork, where it was stamped with the prestigious Best New Music seal. To this day, I get messages from strangers who are livid with me for the score itself (8.3) being, in their estimation, not high enough. In Carti's absence, Whole Lotta Red has only grown more essential — a Rosetta Stone for five years of experimentation and refinement, influencing an entire industry's worth of rappers and producers. Imagine, again, that stack of projector transparencies. Now imagine them being peeled away, one by one, by artists and A&Rs who would go on to build entire songs, albums, and even careers off of a single element of that record. Naturally, the alchemy has not been recreated; where imitators have pulled strings one at a time, Carti makes marionettes milly rock. Fitting, since the puppeteer spends most of his time off stage. The drought between Whole Lotta Red and MUSIC made it seem like the prior gaps in Carti's catalog had been mere blips. This time, the signal-flare promo singles were released with more evident intention, but still held off of DSPs. Fans cataloged Carti's every move with familiar diligence, but a new nihilism had set in: the album, the tour, the next round of merch — none of it was ever coming, they joked. He's in Houston, now, or maybe London; he's in Marrakech; he's in the studio with Pi'erre again; he's trying new designer drugs with Kanye; he's bulking up for Milan's fashion week; he's slimming down for New York's. What was clear, however, was that he was rapping with as much force and intuition as ever, his vocal elasticity, uncanny sense of rhythm, and slyly outré imagery in perfect ensemble. See 'Different Day,' which is delivered like a breathless, middle of-the-night account of a terrible dream; see 'H00DBYAIR,' which, mercifully, made the final cut and imagines that the creative explosion of circa-2014 Atlanta rap took place, instead, in hell. MUSIC is not the paradigm-warping force that Whole Lotta Red was, either for Carti or for rap writ large. It ingests and spits out far more varied and interesting sounds than just the rage and rage-adjacent rap that exists in WLR 's wake, but the sound palette, tempos, and guiding sensibilities are similar enough that you'd expect it to be received as an extension rather than reinvention. And while it justifies its length and seldom drags, the LP as a whole lacks the inevitable, irreducible quality of its best songs, letting MUSIC drift, at times, dangerously close to .zip file territory. Fortunately, even when caught flat-footed, Carti is able to collect himself and exert almost unbelievable amounts of gravity. The relative retread 'OLYMPIAN' is salvaged immediately by 'OPM BABI,' a delirious inversion of soul-sample song mechanics. That the A list features (Future, The Weeknd, Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar) are almost superfluous only underscores Carti's marquee status. If not uniformly engrossing, MUSIC is at least frequently hypnotic. Sometimes it even makes that bent toward hypnosis literal: On 'Cocaine Nose,' what sounds like the chirp from a W. Bush-era Nextel phone echoes under the chorus, like a sonar looking for Instagram models. That's far from the only relic of the past that Carti repurposes here. DJ Swamp Izzo, a fixture on the mixtape circuit that helped break many of those same 2014-vintage Atlanta artists, hosts MUSIC , his bark littering tracks and injecting them with his frantic, towel-me-off urgency. But contrary to what he says at the beginning of 'Munyun,' you do not have to be living 'under a rock' to be unfamiliar with him — you might simply be under 30. This plays differently than when, for his 2021 album Call Me If You Get Lost , Tyler, the Creator enlisted DJ Drama to host and cast the LP as a mixtape from his Gangsta Grillz series. Where Tyler was mining nostalgia, Carti seems more interested in collapsing time altogether. In this process of collapsing time, he also dubiously revives the soft fuzz of early 2010s popular EDM. MUSIC is often as delirious as Whole Lotta Red , but it is seldom as heavy. Carti could never be accused of complacency, but there are stretches of MUSIC where he never quite reaches a point of catharsis or release. While there's 'Cocaine Nose,' as well as explicit reference to molly, it's ketamine — the original title of a song that appears here as 'K Pop' — that is probably the most apt drug analog, known for its soft and dissociative effects. On 'Fine Shit,' the chorus's final line ('Don't say you'll die for me, lil' bitch, just die') sounds less like a dare or provocation and more like permission to embrace a long-awaited conclusion. And still, MUSIC is too idiosyncratic to stay forgettable. The stabs of choral vocals that punctuate 'Crush.' The flitting between vocal registers on 'Rather Lie.' The way he contorts his vocals around Kendrick's ad-libs on 'Mojo Jojo' to make it sound like the LA legend is simply another one of his alter-egos. All of these flourishes make the album, immediately and obviously, unlike dispatches from any of his peers or his children. When he quips, also on 'Mojo Jojo,' that he has 'a house… everywhere,' the hitch in his delivery alone conveys more personality than many allegedly career-defining singles. Speaking of defining a career: Despite those ties to the past, and despite its title, MUSIC makes little attempt to encompass Carti's entire time in the public eye. Not that it should — his appeal has always been tied up in the sense that he was rap's creative vanguard, always moving forward, sketching out blueprint specs for those who would follow him. Having achieved that sort of clairvoyance on his last record, it's natural that fans would look to Carti's new one for what rap might sound like as we inch toward 2030. Instead, he seems more interested in scrambling the source code for what currently populates our feeds, making the smooth, infinite scroll slightly more jagged. Toward that end, even the cadences that sound borrowed from Carti's contemporaries are given new lilts, a different bounce; this is not a new language, but a reminder of the still-untapped potential of one we've already learned. After all, MUSIC is ultimately an exercise in synthesis. Creative Direction / Styling by Rose Marie Johansen. Consultant: Katja Horvat. Production: DIVISION. EP: Alice Wills. Stylist Assistant: Donya Hodge. Lighting Director: Darren Karl-Smith. Post-Production House: Hand of God. Production Service: North of Now Films. Special Thanks: Erin Larsen and Jules de Chateleux
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
SZA Brings Out Lizzo for ‘Special' Performance in Los Angeles
SZA brought an extra special guest at Wednesday night's Grand National Tour stop in Los Angeles: Lizzo. The pair of besties performed SZA's remix of Lizzo's single 'Special,' off her 2022 album of the same name. In matching black outfits, the pair delivered a joyful performance of the empowering track together on the SoFi Stadium stage. The song appeared on Lizzo's Special as a solo track upon release and was remixed by SZA in February 2023. More from Rolling Stone SZA Defends Megan Thee Stallion Against Tory Lanez Fans Calling for His Release Kendrick Lamar and SZA's Grand National Tour Is a Spellbinding Display of Star Power Kendrick Lamar Leads BET Awards Nominations, Doechii, Drake, Future, GloRilla Tie Behind Him Lizzo shared video from the performance on her Instagram after, with the caption 'BABYS FIRST STADIUM PERFORMANCE — I love u @sza u r THEE DIVA !' SZA is co-headlining the Grand National Tour with Kendrick Lamar. The pair have brought out a few big guests to join them on stage, including Playboi Carti, Baby Keem, and Kaytranada. While on tour, their collaboration 'Luther' has been dominating the charts, hitting its thirteenth week at Number One as the pair play Los Angeles. Lizzo has been rolling out her fifth album Love in Real Life this year. The lead single 'Love in Real Life' was her first solo release since her song 'Pink' appeared on the Barbie soundtrack. This will also be her first album since she was accused of sexual assault and a hostile work environment by her former dancers. Last month, she performed latest single 'Still Bad' on Saturday Night Live. Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
Forbes
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The Weeknd Matches Drake And Bruno Mars As He Makes History
The Weeknd's 'Timeless' rebounds to No. 1 on the Hot R&B Songs chart, marking its twentieth week on ... More top and tying the artist with himself and other chart legends. INDIO, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 21: The Weeknd performs with Metro Boomin at the Sahara tent during the 2023 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 21, 2023 in Indio, California. (Photo byfor Coachella) While Hurry Up Tomorrow, the new movie from The Weeknd, did not perform as expected at the box office, the album of the same name is on the rise on charts all around the world. Interest in the project hasn't waned much since it arrived in early 2025, and it's now gaining ground in a meaningful way. This week, in addition to the full-length growing, the set's lead single also rebounds on a number of Billboard rankings. The track is becoming not just a certified smash once more, but a No. 1 success story. As it returns to the summit, it helps the man behind the tune match achievements reached by several other superstars – and even himself. 'Timeless,' a collaboration between The Weeknd and Playboi Carti, jumps back to No. 1 on the Hot R&B Songs chart. It lifts from No. 4 to the peak position in its thirty-third frame on the ranking of the most consumed R&B tunes throughout the U.S. As it rebounds to the top spot, the tune earns its twentieth stay at No. 1. 'Timeless' is just the eighth single in history to spend 20 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot R&B Songs chart. As it reaches that milestone, it ties with three other tracks as the fifth longest-running champion ever. The Weeknd matches his own successful run with 'Starboy,' a collaboration with Daft Punk. He also ties both 'One Dance' by Drake, Wizkid, and Kyla, and 'That's What I Like' by Bruno Mars, all of which held on for just as long. Of the eight tracks that have ruled the Hot R&B Songs chart for 20 weeks or more, three belong to The Weeknd. He continues to lead all tunes with 'Blinding Lights,' which sits in a distant first place with 48 frames at No. 1. SZA claims the next two spots on this all-time ranking, as 'Snooze' and 'Kill Bill' dominated for 32 and 30 frames, respectively. 'Million Dollar Baby,' the breakout cut from Tommy Richman, managed 22 stays at No. 1 during its reign just last year. 'Timeless' was recently reissued as a remix featuring Doechii, one of the hottest names in rap at the moment. Her presence helped spur sales and streams of the track, and while she isn't credited on the Billboard charts — her version is apparently not the most consumed 'Timeless' — the boost in attention can clearly be connected, at least partially, back to her inventive verse. Headlines focusing on The Weeknd's movie also brought attention back to Hurry Up Tomorrow, the album, as well as its singles. There's a good chance that 'Timeless' was headed for a rise anyway, whether Doechii got involved or not. This week, 'Timeless' hits No. 1 on both the Hot R&B Songs and R&B Streaming Songs charts. It can also be found inside the top 10 on five other Billboard tallies.
