In 2016, as “mumble rap” was being used as a slur for the first time, and SoundCloud had become a bolt-hole offering asylum to young hip-hop castoffs, a handful of the movement’s defining figures were further testing the limits of genre, like rebellious teens skirting house rules. Chaotic and free-spirited, they threatened to break off from the music industry entirely, owing to sounds that registered like mosquito tones for many old heads. A viral image laid bare a schism in progress: “No one over 30 can name all 4 of these n****s w/o Google,” the words poking fun at hip-hop’s early onset ageism but also charged with a slight dread, as if the incoming guard proved too exotic to ever have a broader appeal.
Gathered in the meme were the four horsemen of a forecasted rap apocalypse: Lil Uzi Vert, 21 Savage, Lil Yachty and Playboi Carti. It was true that all four were enemies of rap formalism, pushing lucidity to the brink, but Carti was the hardest to pin down. For a while, he seemed to exist on the periphery of rap, as if it was something he was doing begrudgingly. Many rappers are matter-of-fact about coveting the lifestyle that notoriety brings, but he was the rare rapper who seemed to want to skip the hassle of rapping itself to get there. He didn’t have verses, he had mantras — like on “Broke Boi,” the first official song he ever released, where he seemed to be fumbling through an incantation, trying to cast a spell to keep brokeness away at all costs. The track, which referenced snap music and reimagined the lethargic gloating of Gucci Mane and Shawty Lo (his foundational influences) as dazed chants, hinted at a dichotomy that would define him: off-the-radar but constantly on the move. “Keep a small circle, I can’t f*** with squares,” he rapped. “I had to get it how I got it, n****, life ain’t fair.”
In the years since, no one has embodied the destructive promise of the SoundCloud movement more than Carti, nor done more to bring that sonic vision into the present day. While the other three rappers in his class eventually took strides to ingratiate themselves with the system, Carti has burrowed further and further into a self-serving unorthodoxy. His third album, released on Friday, was initially titled Narcissist before he changed it to something even more egomaniacal: MUSIC. (The cover overlays two different typefaces that simply read: “I am music.”) With a title like that, you might expect some kind of omnivorous survey of the sonic landscape or a history of genre. What’s actually presented is a distillation of the best and worst things about hip-hop culture in this moment, one that puts Carti at the center of it all, a rip-roaring statement of purpose from the vampiric JRPG final boss of bass-boosted rap.
From the beginning, Carti has been uncanny, existing between swag rap and esoteric punk. After spending his early teens in Riverdale, Ga. (a city 12 miles south of downtown Atlanta), imitating the music of the blog era, he was sucked into the orbit of oddball rap label Awful Records in 2013 when a friend linked him with the crew’s producer Ethereal, who helped develop his early sound. His stint as a member of the Awful roster was short-lived; he moved to New York at 18, was mentored by A$AP Mob co-founder A$AP Bari and stylist Ian Connor, and was signed to Interscope through the crew’s imprint AWGE in 2016. At one point, Carti had so little official music to his name that he called himself the “Jay Electronica of mumble rap.” Songs kept leaking with no commercial release in sight. He’d pop up in feature spots with Key! or Maxo Kream or Rich the Kid, only to retreat into the ether just as quickly. When he finally stepped into the light in 2017, it was as a high-wire act: His first official drops, alongside Lil Uzi Vert — “Lookin” and “wokeuplikethis*” — found him turning entire verses into ad-libs. His work with the producer Pi’erre Bourne, most notably the spoke-clicking carousel “Magnolia,” made a thrasher circus of his snapping, incessant commands. Working together on his debut album, 2018’s Die Lit, the pair seemed to imagine the beastly guitar rig from Mad Max: Fury Road as if built of Fisher-Price toys. Despite having no singles or marketing push, the album landed at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, marking Carti a cult star.
As a headliner, the rapper proved to be as mercurial as he was inscrutable. He announced his second album, Whole Lotta Red, only months after the first, but its development was slow-going, plagued by leaks and delays. In the interim came more swerves: He made a high-pitched “baby voice” his new signature, appeared uncredited on Tyler, the Creator‘s “EARFQUAKE” and vanished from social media. Talking to The Fader in 2019, he weighed putting a collaboration with producer Metro Boomin on WLR or adding it to a joint album of theirs that never materialized: “This s*** could go on my album, but if it goes on the album, then we gotta change the whole thing.” Later he added, “I could be done if I wanted to. I’m just trying to top s***. I might make the hardest song ever tomorrow.” In the days preceding the release, a snippet of a song with Trippie Redd called “Miss the Rage” established the name and parameters of the style he was honing. “Rage music,” fashioned in the mold of Die Lit, was an aggressive trap microgenre of dark, distorted synth loops and clattering, muddy 808 drums, mirroring the pixilated aesthetics of video game music. Whole Lotta Red was released without rollout on Christmas Day, debuting at No. 1 and cementing volatility as the main throughline of his work. Any song might spiral off the hinges, or create a fusion reaction; waiting around to see what he might do next was crucial to the appeal.
If Whole Lotta Red was Carti’s opus, lawless yet congruous, setting him at the forefront of rage music’s evolution and imagining a trap Transylvania, MUSIC puts the rapper at the end of a metamorphic Avatar Cycle, envisioning Carti as a nexus for the continuum of Auto-Tuned MCing, especially in Atlanta. Though the new album does not make an argument for his artistry as “genreless,” as he seems to believe, it does present him as the last incarnation of a long-unheralded rap experimentalism, dialing rage’s decibels even higher before scattering to probe golden-era trap, nu metal, cloud rap and plugg, all with him as the point of convergence. Listeners are guided through this tour by DJ Swamp Izzo, a staple of Atlanta rap who toured with Gucci Mane and D4L and hosted mixtapes for Young Thug and Young Scooter. Izzo is the anchor for an anarchic but purposeful journey that treks around the trap universe, with all roads eventually leading back to Black mecca. There isn’t much of a rhythm to the album — sequencing a 30-song LP may be next to impossible — but MUSIC does have a certain feng shui, even if the direction of its energy isn’t immediately clear. The disorientation feels crucial to Carti’s performance of a raving fashionmonger: “I found Jesus, Christian Dior,” he raps on “K POP.” A song later, on “EVIL J0RDAN,” he lays out his mandate and priorities: “I’m a emo thug in my phase / Syrup, syrup, syrup, syrup, tell her to go change,” his voice fogged out and slightly haunted.
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Though his verses do have a textual home base, reveling in solipsism and whimsical goonery, Playboi Carti songs are less about what is said than how he says it. Within the constellation of Auto-Tune manipulators both from his hometown and beyond, Carti’s innovation is akin to voice-over work — expanding rap’s formal boundaries not simply through melody, but a deeper understanding of inflection. Early on, in the hands of someone like T-Pain, Auto-Tune was still about pitch correction, hardening a melody’s angles by leaning into the tool’s limits. Artists like Lil Wayne muddied the technology’s use further, toward distortion. By the time Future took his turn it wasn’t even about euphony, but texture. Chief Keef was among the first to think of it as a means to change the lilt or swing of a word or phase — and Carti, as much a child of Keef as of any name in this lineage, continues a move to the extreme end of that axis.
In Carti’s world, modulation and intonation are a means to warp the dimensions of a song. The character of a voice can come as much from accentuation and cadence — from the stress and tension of toying with the elasticity of phonetic sounds — as from timbre. Listen to the way he flexes and contracts into syllables on “HBA,” or the way he ribbits through slashing, skittish flows on “LIKE WEEZY”; clock his voice’s cloudy translucence on “FINE S***” and then its surreal opacity on “PHILLY” with Travis Scott. To the uninitiated ear, it doesn’t sound like the same rapper is leading all of these songs. There are moments of eerily accurate Future cosplay (“TOXIC,” “DIS 1 GOT IT,” “WALK”), which can be read both as homage and evidence of his gift for shapeshifting. When Young Thug — a guest spot Carti held up the album’s release to squeeze in last-minute — appears on “WE NEED ALL DA VIBES” with the true-blue crooner Ty Dolla $ign, their buoyancy and tunefulness is distinctly at odds with Carti’s monochromatic murmurs. He uses melody some, but really as an afterthought. On the Whole Lotta Red track “Metamorphosis” he rapped, “They can’t understand me, I’m talking hieroglyphics,” and that’s as good a thesis as any for what he’s after: an application of language so illegibly stylized as to be both otherworldly and distinctly curious, hard to parse and thus all the more intriguing.
Even Kendrick Lamar, freshly canonized as one of hip-hop’s critical authorities, recognizes the value in this approach: “I need that beep, beep, beep, beep, extraterrestrial Carti,” he muses on “MOJO JOJO.” Carti is happy to oblige, uncorking his many quirks: “I’m an alien off that Molly, I see stars, I see space,” he chirps back on “GOOD CREDIT.” In this way, Carti represents the dark evolution of the ATLien line, a manifestation of the local music’s pursuit of eccentricity and autonomy. “You can do anything from Atlanta,” André 3000 once told NPR. “I think Atlanta is almost like a freedom land, because we had no ties to anything.” Though the scene built in subsequent years was made in OutKast‘s iconoclastic image, its rappers often embody a freewheeling spirit that pushes beyond what the group itself sounded like. I get the sense, listening to this album, that Carti defines music in just this way: the freedom to do anything, as guided by the Class of 3000 ethos Andre bestowed upon all residents when he sounded the call.
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It may be presumptuous to call your album MUSIC, but in a certain sense, this record does feel like a microcosm of the current culture. An album long in development hell gets a date on short notice. Streamers become the lead commentators: Akademiks is leaking info about it and Kai Cenat is going live to react to it as if tuned in to the State of the Union. The release is delayed day-of to add more songs, and all of the features are initially uncredited when it finally does drop. It’s 30 tracks long and many are under or around two minutes. What’s more, allegations of domestic violence hang over the release, but the artist’s high-profile collaborators continue to embrace him as long as doing so is still lucrative. (Kendrick’s presence here, given the “weird case” angle of his anti-Drake crusade, feels especially telling: Rap morality is sticky, generally conditional, often tangled and hypocritical.) You can see the album, in many ways, as the premonition coming true: SoundCloud rap having the last laugh, for better and worse.
It’s been nearly 10 years since, supposedly, no one over 30 could name mumble rap’s fantastic four, and every one of them has become a luminary to varying degrees. Carti himself is almost 30 now, and we can recognize in him a different model of the anti-star. He is unquestionably famous, and yet still exists on the fringes somehow. Even reclusive stars like Kendrick know where the camera lens is and are performing for it in one way or another; it is unclear if Carti even knows there’s a camera. There is no desire shown to go through the usual media-personality rigmarole. He doesn’t come off as particularly charming or charismatic, and his music, despite topping the charts, isn’t all that accessible. It is his brand of non-participation that set the terms for many of the niche rappers who have lately built their own online colonies, circumventing industry buy-in and centrist expectations, allowing their absence to enhance their myths and lore. Carti isn’t music, in any definitive sense, but he does make a compelling case for his role in our current musical reality. Whether that new order is apocalyptic or visionary may depend on who is listening.
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