For years now, one in every of hip-hop’s most widespread debates has been: Who’s the following Kendrick Lamar? The query displays everlasting anxiousness about rap’s future as a storytelling medium. When the now-37-year-old Tremendous Bowl headliner blew up within the early 2010s, he was hailed as a new-school evangelist for old-school lyricism. However hip-hop’s post-Lamar years have seen a surge of curiosity in—to make use of an insulting time period—“mumble rap”: celebration music that doesn’t overtly appear writerly and in lots of circumstances doesn’t pressure to say a lot in any respect.
Lamar’s participation in three songs on Playboi Carti’s new album, Music, means that the divide between these two approaches won’t be as stark because it appears. A 29-year-old Atlanta native, Carti’s music scans as anti-meaning, all muttering and vibes. He’s the undisputed predominant character of hip-hop for listeners his age and youthful, and Music, his first album since 2020, is racking up one thing near Taylor Swift–degree gross sales figures. This recognition might sound to replicate all types of ready-made issues about Gen Z’s curiosity in immediacy over depth. But the ceaselessly gorgeous Music remains to be, in its approach, telling a narrative suited to its instances.
To explain Carti is to explain an absence. He likes to type himself as a vampire—black leather-based, crimson contacts—whereas revealing little of himself on-line. His concert events are smoke-drenched rituals designed to spur moshing, and his music is all about sensation. His beats have numerous element however no mounted heart, creating rhythms that recall to mind uneven waves or a report that’s caught in a groove. A synth or guitar is all the time prickling within the background, casting a putrid haze. His rapping has a frail, slithering high quality; his vocal tone morphs between cute squeakiness and ragged rottweiler growls. Once I pay attention, I don’t think about an individual performing. Relatively, I really feel like I actually have been lowered to a pinprick of consciousness that’s bobbing by way of a dream.
With every launch, that dream has gotten darker and denser. Music, Carti’s fourth correct album, is a 30-song chunk of noise. It opens with a riff that sounds prefer it’s being performed by a welding machine, paired with Carti gasping his lyrics as if in agony. The impact is assaultive however intelligent, jolting listeners’ reflexes after which toying with their consideration. Each few seconds of the album, some new provocation hits the ear: Possibly the beat switches, or Carti’s collaborator DJ Swamp Izzo shouts his personal identify, or a verse stops just a few syllables sooner than anticipated. “Crush” builds up megatons of vitality with the assistance of gospel choirs; “Evil J0rdan” creates a polyrhythmic impact out of what appears to be a ringing cellphone.
Harsh as these songs are, the slogan “I Am Music”—written on the album cowl—works on just a few ranges. It matches a tattoo that Lil Wayne, a croaky-voiced affect on Carti, has on his face. It’s an assertion of Carti’s eminence in fashionable music, as attested by the album’s options by hip-hop’s reigning guard: Lamar, Future, Travis Scott, The Weeknd, Younger Thug, Lil Uzi Vert, Ty Dolla Signal. (Ye has been whining on X about being left off.) It additionally speaks to Carti’s core competency, the attribute that coheres his chaos: musicality, the power to create a way of motion and drama with pure sound.
Musicality, to be clear, is totally different from songwriting capability. For those who focus too intently on any piece of Music, the magic dissipates. Many tracks quantity to a unusual beat and some seconds of vaporous rapping. Lyrically, Carti rambles in a not notably distinctive, generally stomach-turning approach about violence and intercourse. (In 2023, he was arrested for allegedly beating his pregnant girlfriend; his lawyer mentioned the accusations had been false.) The visitor verses have a tendency to focus on Carti’s deficiencies, although within the case of Lamar, it’s the featured rapper who finally ends up trying worse: Lamar’s goofy character work appears belabored subsequent to Carti’s antimatter-like presence.
Nonetheless, one lyrical theme does tie collectively Carti’s sound and content material, akin to it’s: medication. The previous standbys of celebration rap—molly, cocaine, lean—present up many times. However so does the fashionable drug of our time, ketamine, which detaches the person’s subjectivity from their sense of self, making them really feel extra like an object than an individual. Drug-inspired music might be tedious music, like listening to somebody describe their very own dream, however Carti’s substance obsession is central to his venture. That is music about, and that conveys, being excessive on a regular basis. There’s not a second of lucid reflection or respite to be present in an hour and 16 minutes of music.
This sense of being buffeted from one thrill to the following might be what makes Carti the good rapper of the era raised on the limitless scroll. However he’s not simply reproducing the fleeting pleasures of medication and distractions; the music’s bleak, overwhelming, depersonalizing roar is so wealthy that it quantities to an artwork piece about these issues. For those who let it, Music will plug up your ideas and ship you into the churning current, a actuality with out narrative—and in doing so, inform a story about the way it feels to reside proper now.
