Shades of Playboi Carti
I’m writing this to the gentle vibes of “2 Hours of Chill Playboi Carti Songs.” It’s easy to hear why the Atlanta hip-hop star, real name Jordan Carter, developed such a massive online following from this early output on SoundCloud. The music is psychedelic but catchy, almost ambient, liable to melt into the background in minutes. With the help of go-to producer Pi’erre Bourne, Carti contoured this sound for his first project, 2017’s Playboi Carti mixtape. He followed it up just a year later with a guest-filled studio LP, Die Lit. The production was more of a sugar high, with Pi’erre (and a handful of others) subbing in keys dripping with effects and party-minded synths for the self-titled tape’s blissed-out flutes. Still, Carti’s formula remained more or less the same: a slurred nursery rhyme delivery over synthetic candy beats.
Vocally, what Carti does across these two projects and his SoundCloud trove could be called rapping — you’d be hard-pressed to call it anything else. But saying that Carti raps is like saying that a stream sings. Water flowing over a bed of rocks produces a succession of sounds that can be mapped onto a pitch continuum, like a singer does. You could call it a melody. But a brook moves where gravity and topography agree, detached from whatever “tune” it produces. In the same way, Carti’s early flow lacks elocution — there’s only flow. His go-to “what” ad-lib is essentially non-verbal, like taking a deep breath or clearing your throat. Very often, picking out the other words he’s saying is next to impossible thanks to his trademark “baby voice,” which is exactly what it sounds like: nursery rhyme-simple bars, squeaky syllables quashed together, consonants always optional. Even as an exponent I’m hard-pressed to explain the baby voice’s appeal. There’s something about it that seeps into all the right pleasure centers and smothers ruminating thoughts. Above all, it sounds pleasant.
“Pleasant” is among the least appropriate words to describe Whole Lotta Red, Carti’s polarizing third LP, released at the tail end of last year. It makes sense that the album turned so many fans off. Carti adopts a newly minted satanic “vampire” persona, complete with cover art inspired by 70s punk zine Slash. The baby voice is barely there, usurped by a new tool kit of histrionic screams, grunts, growls and mournful sobs, like early Lil Wayne by way of Robert Smith. Practically every song is foregrounded with raspy ad libs — faux-horror bwah! sounds instead of sleepy whats. The album’s occult affectations and in-your-face abrasion are worlds away from the between-the-bedsheets air rap of Die Lit and Playboi Carti. Throw “Magnolia” on for a group of Carti initiates and watch unchanged faces. Then try following it up with “Rockstar Made” and see how it goes over.
But how much has Carti actually changed as an artist? For the most part, he still seems to be running gnomic asides through the neon-bright miasma in his mind, then spitting them out with abandon. Listen to the first mixtape’s “New Choppa” with the title phrase fighting for space against a woozy, blaring beat, cash register cha-chings and gunshots, or Die Lit’s “Pull Up,” whose “lyrics” are almost entirely ad libs and the word “lean,” and you’ll hear the seeds of Whole Lotta Red. After a couple lines rapped in “New Tank,” he giddily half-sings “I love all my thots and codeine” in a new register, like a drunk interjection to a close friend: I love you, man. Maybe Carti wrote the line prior to recording it, but I’d be shocked if that delivery weren’t wholly organic, the fruit of some phantasm suddenly seizing him in the booth. In “M3tamorphosis” he screams, “When you feel like this, can’t nobody tell you shit,” twisting that last word into unrecognizable phonetic constructions. The sentiment draws power from its vagueness, much like the chorus of Die Lit earworm “Long Time”: “Just to feel like this it took a long time.” In both cases it’s not the feeling itself that matters, but its transcendence.
The result is an album that doesn’t feel written so much as emitted, like Playboi Carti and Die Lit before it. But Whole Lotta Red provides a thrilling paradox: it’s both primal and performative. Jordan Carter spends an hour and two minutes being himself playing a character. It doesn’t matter that the paranoid, drug-addled rockstar vampire conceit is never really fleshed out. Meaning lurks in the shadings. “I’m a dark knight, bitch, yeah I can’t sleep,” he spits on “King Vamp” in a cartoonish staccato against the crowd of non-verbal ad libs, the perfect signpost for the Whole Lotta Red sound. The vague phrase itself frees us up to imagine any number of things. Is he paralyzed in bed on a codeine detox, thinking about his dead brother, lamenting what went wrong with Iggy Azalea, running circles in his mind sorting the real friends from the sycophants? He hints at each of these topics on the album, and the hinting is the point. It’s hard to imagine a confessional Carti.
But his next project is supposedly called NARCISSIST. For all we know it could be his Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, stuffed with unblinking deep dives into his past and his psyche. Or, as some fans have speculated, it may not be an album at all, but a new clothing line. With Carti, not knowing is half the fun. No one could have predicted a ski mask and a Balenciaga parka from bright red dreads and fangs, just like no one could have seen King Vamp coming from Die Lit. But at the end of the day, Carti’s vamp shenanigans on Whole Lotta Red sound just as inevitable as the baby voice. He’s been Jordan Carter all along, an art kid messing with his voice, playing characters. Whatever form NARCISSIST takes, and whatever its content, it probably won’t be what you’re imagining. But it will be pure Carti, whoever he is next.
