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Hypebeast
27-05-2025
- 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
New York Times
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Playboi Carti and His Offspring Ponder Life After Rage-Rap
What does it mean that the most meaningful and galvanic artist in contemporary rap music often appears to be retreating from the throne? Playboi Carti recently released his fourth full-length release, 'Music,' which has spent most of the last month atop the Billboard album chart. 'Music,' which aggregates 30 songs even if it doesn't quite stitch them together, is a vivid of-the-moment document of the ways hip-hop has been splintering, lyrically and musically, over the past few years. Carti is a deconstructionist, the latest in a line of Atlanta rappers taking the genre in increasingly chaotic directions. He's maybe the truest and loudest exponent of the post-Drake realignment of hip-hop — indebted to Travis Scott's amplified yelps, the skittishness of several microgenerations of SoundCloud rap, the growth of rap festival culture and its emphasis on physicality, and the way fans on the internet now aggregate around obscurity as much as ubiquity. For these tumultuous times, Carti is a king, even if he's more often in hiding from than courting the spotlight. 'Music' is a reflection of his ambivalence about that fate. In part, it's a doubling down on the things that have made him so special — vocal tics, insistent shards of rhyme, a sense that he's retreating even as he's moving forward. But it also reflects his growing profile and the obligations, or at least opportunities, that come with it, with the addition of several well-known guests. Whereas his last album, the scene-defining 'Whole Lotta Red' from 2020, had a single-mindedness that verged on hardcore, 'Music' is less focused, and attempts to solve several problems at once. For years, Carti has been playing with voices and with the technology that renders them ever more bizarre. In between albums, he drizzled out leaks and loosies, often most thrilling for how he would reinvent his style of rapping, seemingly on the fly. On this album, he's using several distinct voices — a robust croak on 'Trim,' a hard bark on 'Philly,' a nasal chirp on 'K Pop,' a wet and sleazy smear on the excellent 'Cocaine Nose.' He's chameleonic, demonstrating that, in this corner of hip-hop at least, identity is no longer as wrapped up in stylistic consistency as it long was. That's true in his choice of production as well. Songs like 'Like Weezy' and 'Walk' channel earlier generations of Atlanta rap, while 'Opm Babi' and 'Pop Out' are industrially noisy, in defiance of melody. If anything, Carti has been defined by what he long hasn't done: let outsiders into his world. But on 'Music,' Carti is at a kind of crossroads in this regard as well. He is yanking more conventional stars into his orbit — Kendrick Lamar is here, as are Travis Scott and the Weeknd — but Carti barely concedes an inch. And wisely, the guests don't attempt to mimic his style; they simply want the refracted shine. For the most part, those songs, while accessible, feel superfluous and lightly heretical. These dalliances with better known and more famous elders suggests Carti has at least an inclination toward broader attention, even if his relation to stardom is idiosyncratic at best. But reluctant leaders still cultivate followers. You hear the tentacles of Carti's reach all over the rage-rap underground. It's there directly on 'More Chaos' by the Atlanta rapper Ken Carson, who is signed to Carti's Opium imprint, and more circuitously on 'Star' by the young electro-pop singer 2hollis. Of the two main rappers signed to Carti's label — the other is Destroy Lonely — Carson is the riskier and friskier. His strong 2023 album, 'A Great Chaos,' displayed a curiosity about song structure not shared by many of his peers. But mostly Carson is pure id, a logical step in the rage-rap lineage beginning with Scott and trickling down through Carti. His music is part of a movement, in at least this corner of hip-hop, away from narrative or melody or even words into something far more physical and pugnacious. In the same way that festival-sized EDM pummeled away the nuances of club music's many delicate subscenes, hip-hop's rage-rap corner is designed to be experienced in the pit at Rolling Loud. Plenty of the songs on 'More Chaos' function as code for how to jostle up against 10,000 other rowdy people for a jolt of controlled anarchy — they're exhortations to mosh first and foremost. On the first half of the album, especially, the production is deep fried and even more deeply addled, with bass textures that throb beyond the boundaries of conventional speakers, and almost no space between sounds. The beats are claustrophobic and messy — they leave no room for breath, or perspective. The prevailing mood is agitated anxiety. Carson lacks Carti's innovative spirit, or his outright oddity — he's simply living in one of the lanes Carti chiseled out five years ago. Mostly, he raps like he's still learning to rap, at times reduced to spaced-out chanting: 'Money spread, money spread, money spread,' 'I'm a Black rock star, I'm a Black rock star, I'm a Black rock star.' Several songs fade out while he's still rapping, as if tying up the thoughts were too much labor. The back half of the album is more lyrically vivid; there are flickers of warmth and even self-doubt on 'Kryptonite' and 'Thx.' But the beats still relentlessly pummel the listener, making 'More Chaos' not an album qua album, nor even an album qua playlist, but rather album as soundtrack for an experience — it's why the details don't much matter. Last year, Carson took 2hollis on tour as an opening act, and the videos of his sets that spread on TikTok and Instagram were rowdy and intense. The Los Angeles artist makes ecstatic electro-pop with lightly gothic overtones — its busyness is indebted to the sort of pinball-machine production Carti helped popularize, but 2hollis, who both sings and raps, imposes brightly gasping, and sometimes flirtatious, vocals on those sounds. No matter how sensual or ecstatic 2hollis sounds, like on the fame meditation 'Tell Me' or the winking 'Nice,' there's an underlying sense of anxiety just below the surface. And even when his songs lean into other influences — crunchy big-tent EDM, whiny pop-emo, early '90s club music — it's still music designed for rowdy crowds. Of these two tributaries of Carti's influence, 2hollis's is the more opaque and indirect one. It understands his music as a method of absorption, a call to physical attention. Internet-driven fame is a curious evolution — it's easier than ever to have a couple of quick hits, then rapidly be performing to 10,000 fans losing their minds and bodies. But that doesn't exempt young stars from evanescence. Carti, Carson and 2hollis are testing the waters of what might come next. When the crowds have already assembled, what will you do with them? Keep on raging, or create a bigger tent.
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Playboi Carti's ‘Music' Bows at Number One
Playboi Carti's Music debuts at Number One on the Billboard 200 albums chart, the publication reports. It's the Atlanta artist's second Number One album, further cementing his commercial stature ahead of his upcoming stadium tour. The project debuted with 298,000 album equivalent album units in the U.S., according to Luminate. Of those units, streams comprise 283,000 (equaling 284 million on-demand official streams of the album's songs). With Music's 30 songs tallying a total of 384 million on-demand official streams combined, it becomes the biggest streaming week for any album in nearly a year. The last big streaming earner came back in May 2024, when Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poet's Department garnered 428.54 million streams of its songs collectively in its second week. More from Rolling Stone Playboi Carti Deepens His Gen Z Rap Dominance Lady Gaga's 'Mayhem' Tops the Albums Chart Playboi Carti Recruits Kendrick Lamar and Four Other Takeaways From His New Album Music is Carti's third album to hit the Top 10 on the Billboard 200 and bests the 100,000 first-week units earned from his first Number One album, Whole Lotta Red, which bowed on the chart in January 2021. Whole Lotta Red was certified gold in January 2022. His debut album Die Lit, also accredited gold, debuted at Number Three with 61,000 first-week units. The rapper's long-awaited new album had been promised for more than a year, with a four-pack of 2023 singles spurring anticipation that the project would be dropping in 2024, and on '2024' he rapped, '2024…music,' further teasing its impending arrival. Last September, he rolled out pre-order information and began taking orders for physical copies of Music, and also shared merch on his official site. The site proclaimed that the digital album would be available 'no later than six months from September 12th, 2024.' The album dropped two days after the purported March 12 deadline. Playboi Carti's Music unseats Lady Gaga's Mayhem, which after debuting at Number One last week, slips down a notch to Number Two with 74,000 units. Elsewhere on the albums chart, Kendrick Lamar's GNX falls to Number Three with 71,000 units; PartyNextDoor and Drake's $ome $exy $ongs 4 U garnered 66,000 units and moved from the Top Three to Number Four; and SZA's SOS also moved down a notch to round out this week's Top Five, earning 62,000 units. Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Is Playboi Carti Rap's Next — or Last — Superstar?
In the almost five years since the release of 'Whole Lotta Red,' Playboi Carti's second studio album, the Atlanta rapper graduated from a potentially influential internet curio to a full-blown, era-defining headliner. Still, even while closing festivals with his brand of mosh pit mayhem and helping to lead songs like 'Fein' by Travis Scott and 'Carnival' by Ye (formerly Kanye West) into the Billboard Top 5, Carti has maintained the edge and mystique of an underground cult hero. That is, in part, thanks to absence: canceled concerts, blown appearances and repeated, yearslong delays for his increasingly hyped follow-up to 'Whole Lotta Red,' with a growing legion of obsessive fans sating themselves instead by chasing every Carti-flavored online morsel, official and unofficial. Then, last week, it finally arrived: 'Music,' a 30-song album lasting more than 75 minutes, with appearances by a who's who of modern rap stars, including Kendrick Lamar, Future and Travis Scott. A streaming blockbuster already, 'Music' has confounded and satisfied in equal measure, likely raising more questions than it answers: Is this what mainstream hip-hop sounds like now? Could anything Carti put out have lived up to the anticipation? And what role do toxic masculinity and obscure internet rabble-rousers play in this fandom? To discuss these Playboi Carti conundrums and many more on Popcast, the hosts Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli of The New York Times were joined by Kieran Press-Reynolds, a columnist for Pitchfork and a contributor to The Times and other publications.
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Playboi Carti Gifts Kai Cenat And Dabo His YVL Chain During Rolling Loud LA Performance
Playboi Carti is on top of the world between releasing his new album Music this past weekend and being the closing headliner for Rolling Loud LA. The Atlanta rapper continued the good vibes by gifting his YVL chain to Kai Cenat and Dabo mid-performance. YVL stands for 'Young Vamp Life,' which is a major part of Carti's persona and aesthetic. Thus, parting ways with that chain was a big deal for him but it was an even bigger deal for Cenat, who live-streamed the Sunday evening performance (March 16) on Twitch. He and Dabo were enthused at the surprise gift and shared a photo opp wearing it on social media after the set. Carti's Rolling Loud performance included guest appearances by The Weeknd, Nav, and more. The popular streamer also got to go out on stage and showed himself meeting all of the rappers on his stream. At a few points during his broadcast, the audio could barely be heard due to the bass and the roar of the crowd. Check out Cenat's experience watching Playboi Carti below. Playboi Carti released Music this past Friday (March 14), closing off a nearly five-year gap since his last album Whole Lotta Red. Fans impatiently awaited this new LP, clinging to every leak, YouTube exclusive release, Instagram post, or feature that Carti did in the meantime. He seemingly did not disappoint, as Music ended up being a 30-song album featuring Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, Travis Scott, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Young Thug, Skepta, Jhene Aiko, and Ty Dolla $ign. This comes just over a month after the enigmatic artist joined The Weeknd to perform 'Timeless' at the Grammys. It was the Canadian artist's proper return to the long-running award show after years of boycotting them for not properly recognizing his music, making it a huge moment for both artists. The Weeknd and Carti have collaborated numerous times over the last few years, starting with 'Popular' in 2023 from The Idol soundtrack. Their September 2024 track 'Timeless' debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and now they have 'Rather Lie' from Music. Check out the 'Timeless' music video below. More from Kendrick Lamar Takes Shot At A$AP Relli On Playboi Carti Track "GOOD CREDIT" Playboi Carti Finally Confirms 'I Am Music' Release Date Kevin Hart Reveals Advice He Gave To Kai Cenat, Druski To Ensure Their Success In Entertainment
