Album Cover via Playboi Carti/Spotify
Miguelito has been riding with Swamp Izzo since the Shawty Lo days.
Playboi Carti’s declaration on “R.I.P. Fredo (Notice Me)” was a lie. At the very least, it wasn’t meant to be true forever. On the hook for Die Lit’s penultimate song, Carti grinds two simple words, “notice me,” down to the necessary syllables. When repeated, it sounds like he alternates between “notice me” and “they know it’s me.” Even if the phrase has outlived its accuracy, it will always be a phonokinetic sleight of brilliance.
Until now, there’s always been some uncanny quirk that – regardless of how much it was copied – let us know that it’s Playboi Carti. His appeal can’t be pried away from the felicities of each release. The self-titled album danced at the edges of hypnagogic trap; he could anchor an entire song just by repeating his name, Die Lit was the full-length debut of his petulant toddler voice, Whole Lotta Red indulged every whim and was happy to spit in the face of already loose morphological expectations.
By comparison, MUSIC is tame—and at its worst, pedestrian. On MUSIC, or as it appears on the album’s cover, I AM MUSIC, we don’t always know it’s Carti. He gives us an epistemology on earlier work, but when it comes to MUSIC, we’re left to discern the elephant in the dark. With a title like that, MUSIC wants to define itself in an all-encompassing manner. This is Music. The alpha and omega, the rubric. Its lack of any sustained novelty too often relegates it to just music.
The first obstacle Carti’s fourth album has to overcome is its swollen tracklist. Long albums qua long albums are value neutral. MUSIC being an hour and seventeen minutes is irrelevant. That time is divided among thirty songs though, testing its cohesiveness and making sequences autonomous and transitions clunky. Whole Lotta Red was only six songs and fourteen minutes shorter, but almost all its songs are interested in exploring the capillaries of that accelerated style. MUSIC’s individual songs are more like loosely connected ephemera. The opening five songs work together nicely—with “EVIL J0RDAN” their malevolent nucleus—yet Travis Scott’s “straight up” must assert itself as the flaccid adlib in contemporary rap and ruin the fun.
In the hours leading up to MUSIC’s release, Carti said “I’m the Travis Scott of Atlanta after this.” That’s where the thrust of this album’s problems lie – in trying to emulate tropes that are less singular and fierce than Carti’s own. About a third of the album could appear on the projects of artists they’re supposed to feature. And that’s fine if you get excited for The Weeknd’s latest album or find Skepta’s contemporary work riveting. An egregious example sits on “Philly” where Scott’s sophomoric wordplay (“I’m like a broken back/I’m back/I snap”) rubs off on Carti with the unimaginative “I’m geeked in the sky like a pilot.” Moments like that make it easier to question Carti’s impulses here. When he said “I feel like Morpheus” on Whole Lotta Red’s “M3tamorphosis” it didn’t need an explanation. “They think I’m Osama” feels coerced.
Carti has a particular interest in borrowing the way Future vibrates his words until they leave a residue. You could pick your own reference, but elements of “JUMPIN” and “DIS 1 GOT IT” feel pulled directly from the ten-year-old 56 Nights (“All that old shit y’all still doing, man, I’m over it”) or the register Future drops to in places like Super Slimey’s “Group Home”. The imitation bleeds into cadence as well. Jumping from “mollys, perkys” to “yeah, yeah millennium” and “smokin P” to a Peewee Longway shoutout is Pluto’s sauce all the way. There are moments when he’ll adopt the mannerisms of other Atlanta acts like Bktherula or Sahbabii, which makes their recent work seem more immediate by comparison. I shouldn’t have to double check a feature list to know if I’m listening to the main artist. Again, we don’t always know it’s Carti.
Something starts to congeal across the latter half of the album though, particularly the space between “GOOD CREDIT” and “LIKE WEEZY.” The former holds Kendrick Lamar’s most welcome addition to MUSIC. It should be obvious that means the Compton native appears clothed in ideological incoherence and a villainous psyche. “Cocaine Nose” feels simple at first, but it’s a testament to the way producer F1lthy constrains the more exorbitant tendencies of tread music in deferrence to the artist (see “Poland”). Carti mobilizes that freedom to make post-nasal drip his Proustian madeleine. “TWIN TRIM” is a Lil Uzi Vert interlude that’s light and dissolves too quickly because you want it to overstay its place on the album. The jab-hook combo of “OLYMPIAN” and “OPM BABI” is where you find the most concentrated potency. “OPM BABI” holds all the minerals scattered throughout MUSIC in one song: a maelstrom of bass and sound whose parts would be irritable if isolated, syntactical ingenuity—he imagines linguistic cannibalism (“She wanna eat my lingo, hold up, what the fuck?”)—and a healthy serving of DJ Swamp Izzo drops.
Anyone who condescends at the Atlanta-solidified (but South Carolina-raised) DJ’s work on the album is a rube and shouldn’t be trusted with curating the ambiance of a Chipotle. He injects pace and life into MUSIC to keep moments from slipping into the irredeemable. Hearing him scream “Alive!” makes you cognizant of your beating heart. “Let’s Go!” makes you nod and whisper “Okay, let’s.”
If I’m being generous, Swamp Izzo detractors might be gesturing towards his signatures not meshing with MUSIC’s palette. They’re missing a more generative point. The uneven distribution of DJ drops and interjections usually found on mixtapes, the division of track runs into sonic cubicles, the way features are cloaked in a faux-mystery, suggests Playboi Carti was attempting to negotiate with the album as a form.
Some demands were met. I’ve already lauded Swamp Izzo, but MUSIC frustrates pedants who insist there’s an essential difference between “album” and “mixtape.” “TWIN TRIM” doesn’t have Carti say a word and channels the album’s collaborative spirit in a way that could have saved other features from their lethargy. MUSIC rejects a climax unless you choose to posit one. And, by its sheer volume, it’s almost an “anti-album,” daring us to listen in one jagged incongruous sitting. Still, Carti’s more nimble when the formal playfulness is obsessed with his relationship to the beat or semantic frivolity and doesn’t try to seep into issues of grand narrative.
There might be truth to the idea that Kanye’s rollout schema, or schemes, from The Life of Pablo onwards have contributed to a fetishization of incompleteness and tinkering with releases post facto. Deluxe Edition-by-fiat happens too often and concise albums appear with a new color grade and ten unnecessary songs a week after release. Carti isn’t immune to the trend. Abbreviating “H00DBYAIR,” which has been floating around for over a year, to “HBA” is symbolic of the track’s final mixing decisions and reeks of administrative intervention—”kill the A&R in your own head”—to neuter the whims that have made Carti worth discussing in these terms.
There’s also a clear desire to be seen as “of Atlanta” that doesn’t fully land. Of course Carti is from there and doesn’t have to prove that, but the last song is called “SOUTH ATLANTA BABY” to drive home the point. It opens with Swamp Izzo telling Playboi Carti, “This music right here put you in a whole ‘nother category” and, then turning to the audience, “We create our own genre…from now on don’t box us in any category.” That illustrates the album’s unresolved tension between wanting to be (1) novel and (2) a cultural artifact of Atlanta. Part of the intrigue of Playboi Carti are the ways in which he isn’t tethered to a clear tradition. Sampling Bankroll Fresh and Rich Kidz doesn’t transfer the kindred ethos he wants into the album. Nodding toward that music isn’t enough to put you in its lineage and it’s okay to be outside of it. The samples do sound pretty good though.
Not to stretch too much, but its relative proximity to the release of Robert Egger’s Nosferatu—and Carti’s vampire imagery that still lingers—underlines a shared restraint between the two works. There’s a sobriety that means to sharpen their final products, but ends up stifling the good ideas. There’s more concern in tinkering with atmosphere, and borrowing stylistic flourishes, than conversing with the apparitions. I’m supposed to interpret MUSIC as something new, rather than being seduced into figuring out exactly what it is. Kendrick’s words actually function as an indictment when he says “I need that full alien Carti, I need that beep-beep-beep-beep extraterrestrial Carti.” We know that Carti, but we didn’t get it.
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