After umpteen months of vague promises and biffed deadlines, Playboi Carti’s newest opus finally materialized the other day like a transmission from the edge of oblivion — and with one last-minute tweak. Without updating the cover art, the album’s title had been pruned from “I Am Music” to plain old “Music.” Now that we’ve heard all 30 tracks of this thing, that seemingly superficial revision counts as an existential edit. In the 11th hour of his big comeback, Carti deleted himself.
People like to call his music “rage rap,” but “void rap” feels more fitting. As ever, the Georgia native is a lyrical nihilist, but a feisty technician, punctuating his bludgeoning repetitions with deep pockets of dead air, and, in that nothingness, makes room for us to feel and dream. “Music” might not be quite as blunt-force extreme as Carti’s 2020 masterpiece album, “Whole Lotta Red,” but it still conjures thrilling impossibilities: a vacuum charged with restless energy; a meaninglessness saturated with deep feeling; an ecstatic annihilation of the self. No “I.” Just music.
End of carousel
To better understand that self-implosion, listen to how he collapses individual words. The album’s first and most frequently deployed syllable is “sseeyuhh,” an ad lib that Carti likes to stir into the dark matter between his rhymes like stardust. It sounds like an ancestral echo of Young Jeezy’s “jyeah” from two decades back, but it might go even deeper than that. Remember the quote attributed to John Coltrane about his musical ambitions to “start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once”? Maybe Carti is doing the inverse on a smaller scale. Whenever he slides a fresh “sseeyuhh” between his teeth, he sounds like he’s trying to say “yes” by starting at each end of the word, then moving in both directions from the outside in.
Other words are mere containers for him to crush, bend, distend and explode. Over the grinding synthesizers of the album opener, “Pop Out,” he raps in a paradoxical gravel-chirp, enunciating the word “pop” in a way that signals a burst, then a droop. On “Fine S—,” he elongates the word “die” into two distinct syllables, either to evoke wails of grief, singsong menace, the permanence of death or all of the above.
Much of this word-rupture results from Carti’s impulse to cycle through various voices. There’s tweedly Carti. Sneerful Carti. Whispery Carti. Foreign-object-stuck-in-windpipe Carti. His identity-swapping constitutes a form of hip-hop playtime you can trace back to 1983’s landmark anthem “Beat Bop” by K-Rob and Rammellzee, in which the latter famously deployed his “gangsta duck” voice, funneling indelible wildstyles through his sinuses. Carti’s clogged-throat tone — on “Evil Jordan,” “K Pop,” “Radar” and many more — might become similarly iconic somewhere down the road. For now, he sounds as if he’s trying to inhale his words. A different kind of implosion, perhaps. And when he rhymes in these different voices, is he expressing his multitudes? Or is it another means of self-erasure?
To keep himself from turning into nobody, Carti surrounds himself with somebodies. The album’s most recurrent guest is Swamp Izzo, the veteran Atlanta DJ who plays the album’s host and hype man, proudly declaring Carti the “flyest” rapper “on planet Earth.” As for the other Earthlings assembled — Travis Scott, Future, Skepta, Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert, Ty Dolla $ign, Jhené Aiko — they each offer terrestrial testimony in hopes of proving that Carti is actually of this world. Only one visitor fouls the scene: the Weeknd, whose played-out cooing on “Rather Lie” elicits the sensation of finding something in your food.
The album’s standout collaborator is Kendrick Lamar, a rap superhero currently standing on top of the world — and although it’s unfortunate that this past year will be remembered as Lamar’s Drake-beef era instead of his rapping-in-funny-voices era, he’s doing his best to tip the scales during “Mojo Jojo,” gassing up his host at the outset: “I need that beep-beep-beep-beep extraterrestrial Carti.” From there, Lamar is happy to play copycat games, repeating fragments of Carti’s lines as if he’s being tutored in an alien language.
There are plenty of other outer-space invocations sprinkled into Carti’s otherwise deadening rhymes about sex, drugs and violence, but as propulsive and expansive as “Music” feels, its cosmic motion ultimately clenches. Some cosmologists have hypothesized that our universe is a cyclic thing, starting with a “big bang” and ending with a “big crunch,” in which everything will be summoned back into the nothing whence it came. Rap music might feel like the only 21st-century art form that’s still moving forward, but here’s Carti on the vanguard, big-crunching, making rap’s cutting edge feel like it’s cutting inward.
