It wouldn’t be a Playboi Carti album rollout if you didn’t have to sweat for it. Music, which comes five years after Whole Lotta Red, and which we thought we would get sometime last year, finally arrived Friday morning, though even that included a multiple-hour delay from its original 12 a.m. Pacific time slot. With its daunting 30-song track list, you can see that Carti tried to make up for the wait.
Music (or I Am Music, if you prefer) is a hard album to review because of how little it resembles an album in any classic sense, and I’m not just referring to the DJ Swamp Izzo tags throughout the project. It’s more reminiscent of mixtapes by Gucci Mane, Waka Flocka Flame, or, more specifically, Lil Wayne’s Drought and Dedication series. It’s a collection of 30 songs that don’t always jell together, and (sorry, old man here) aren’t exactly sequenced well. But no one would ever argue that Gucci’s Chicken Talk or Wilt Chamberlain tapes were cohesive, perfect projects, as mixtapes of that ilk tended to be a mixed bag. What made the classic ones classic was a combination of time and place, the good songs being especially good, and the creative freedom that comes from not being pressured to make some big artistic statement. Music maintains this spirit, flooding you with music and letting you make of it what you want. The highs are high enough to forgive the lows.
What’s most interesting about Music is the tension between its mixtape-y elements and its attempts to establish Carti as the biggest rapper of his generation—or, as Carti puts it, his efforts to become “the Travis Scott of Atlanta.” Putting aside whether this is a goal worth pursuing, there are songs where this mountain-scaling ambition is evident, many of which feature Scott himself. In fact, Scott and Kendrick Lamar play the main foils on this album; both appear on four tracks apiece and act almost as spokesmen for Carti’s entry to the pop rap pantheon club.
Scott’s and Kendrick’s features on the album aren’t all bad, but their presence sometimes runs counter to what is most appealing about Carti’s music. It’s also wildly transparent what’s happening here. Carti has always been intensely, sometimes graspingly ambitious, always prepared to do whatever necessary to put himself at a higher level within the industry. This impulse has helped him stay relevant and ahead of the game musically. He moved on from the Pi’erre Bourne sound earlier than his fans probably wanted him to, stopped doing the baby-voice raps just as people were starting to adjust to it, and has been smart about aligning himself with forward-thinking producers. It is the gift and the curse of our best musicians, kinda like how they also tend to be some of our more deplorable human beings, Carti also included there.
But make no mistake: When this album is good, it’s really great. The industrial noise rap of “POP OUT” gives a stronger jolt than a triple espresso. “K POP” and “EVIL J0RDAN” thrum with a hypnotic, aggressive, otherworldly urgency. The three-song run of “RATHER LIE,” “FINE SHIT” and “BACKD00R” makes the best case for Carti’s transition into a major pop artist. “MUNYUN,” “COCAINE NOSE,” “OPM BABI,” “LIKE WEEZY”—all are right there with some of his best songs ever. The album continues the growth of Carti’s sound and style since WLR, an evolution of that album’s rage rap that remains playful and experimental in invigorating ways. Swamp Izzo’s sporadic appearances are never overbearing and add to the energy and excitement of the songs, like a good mixtape DJ should.
Many of the album’s biggest flaws don’t come from Carti directly. Most of the guest appearances don’t really work. The likes of Skepta and Ty Dolla Sign aren’t bad artists, but they’re out of place in Carti’s outer space world. Outside of Lil Uzi Vert, very few know how to hang in this gravity. (As for Kendrick … you’d have a hard time convincing me he would’ve been on this album at all before the beef.) After listening to the original versions of songs like “CRUSH” and “MOJO JOJO,” it’s hard to feel like some of these big names aren’t just getting in the way of the magic.
It’s obvious Carti wants to appeal to as large an audience as is humanly possible. This drive is overzealous and comes at the expense of the diehards (hi) with their strong opinions on what makes Carti great. But when you announce that you literally are music, it only makes sense that you’d try to live up to the claim.
