#maali rambles | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

deadcactuswalking · 4 years ago

Text

Review: Playboi Carti - Whole Lotta Red

I haven’t been this excited by an album in God knows how long so this may all just be rambling but... Long post(s) incoming.

Playboi Carti - Whole Lotta Red

I didn't get Die Lit at first - hell, I don't think I get it entirely still. Sure, Carti and his unique mumbling has grown on me quite a lot from his occasional guest features and extensive leaks, but other than some choice singles from either album, I still don't think I "get" why Playboi Carti is such a lauded rapper, at least amongst overly online music nerd circles. A couple of concerns leading into the record for me were mostly its length, as I saw that exhaustive 24-track listing as well as an hour-long runtime and immediately equated that to Die Lit, which I thought was crippled by overly lengthy runtimes and meandering song ideas. It didn't help that the single "@ MEH", not even on this album, was pretty uninspired and dull. I came into this album expecting something at least vaguely similar to his last full-length and was completely thrown for a loop... and thank God because this might be one of my favourite records of the year.

Whole Lotta Red is a cry for help. Everything about it screams a man consumed by this "rapper lifestyle" and is completely trapped. Throughout this hour of inane trap-rap, we are treated to an in-depth look at Carti as he evolves as a character and as a celebrity... but that's not high on Carti's priorities (and that's why I find this narrative so brilliant). From the first few seconds of the first track, the banger "Rockstar Made", Whole Lotta Red makes damn sure you know it's not fucking around. A set of bassy 808s drown out any remnant of that subtle distorted synth line in the back of the mix, and that's before we get the erratic Carti immediately hitting you with shoddily-mixed vocals, incessant ad-libs and yet somehow plenty of empty space, and lyrics worthy of little analysis, at least on surface level. None of that is to the song's disadvantage though, and Carti rides the beat perfectly in his boyish yelling tone that becomes his signature during the album. Not all of the tracks sound exactly like this, but it's what you should expect going in, and Carti immediately meets and succeeds said expectations.

As soon as the record finishes its first track, it devolves into chaos, and we see Carti's downward spiral into what seems like a pretty depressive state surrounded by yesmen who keep him on a constant rotation of Perkys and hoes. There is no helping Carti on this record but damn do Kanye and Cudi try, with some of their best verses ever on “Go2DaMoon” and “M3tamorphosis” respectively. After these features, Carti is left speechless, with his wordless mumbling following Kanye's comical yet unnervingly self-aware performance barely constituting as a "verse". Of course, this isn't for long as the “Go2DaMoon” ends abruptly for the sake of the heavy 808s that crash into the mix of “Stop Breathing” and grab your attention with his intense and most violent deliveries I've heard from him. Carti hasn't interested me as a performer until now, but the way he interrupts his routine... gasping sounds with his hungriest and clearest rapping ever is genius. We also get a sense of humanity from Carti, where he references how since his brother died, he's constantly seeking revenge in the form of homicide, murder and gang violence that he never fully realises won't fill the hole, at least not yet. For once, Carti sounds like he fucking cares.

What has always intrigued me about Carti was his lack of care for structure or conventions of trap-rap. On "Long Time - Intro", he doesn't come in perfectly when the beat comes in and prefers to stall time with ad-libs, as well as pointless phone call interludes. On "Shoota", he and Lil Uzi Vert split the song in half, leaving Uzi without much percussion to speak of, but when the beat drops and Carti starts rapping it completes the song. On the best tracks from the self-titled mixtape and Die Lit, Carti mixes and matches parts of verses, constant refrains and quirky, synth-lead beats to create jarring trap bangers that hit as hard as possible whilst still never feeling *right* exactly. Throughout Whole Lotta Red, this is so well implemented that Carti's sloppiest choruses, most uninteresting beats and most repetitious hooks feel more unique than most. Shit, if Carti tells me to jump out the house, I'll leap straight out the window. It's just that convincing, especially with how Carti sells this, in a boyish, childlike tone that carries whatever there is of a narrative in this project. You get a sense of naivety out of Carti that you don't get from other hip-hop musicians in the mainstream who want to show how experienced, relaxed and bored with the "rapper lifestyle" they are, whether it's luxury porn or aimless gunplay. Carti isn't bored, or exhausted, he's absolutely consumed and almost inseparable to what it means to be a rapper in 2020.

"M3tamorphosis" is one of the best tracks of the year, and another example where the guests can get through to Carti's rambling and even almost put an end to it. Cudi delivers an incredible meander of a verse, switching his flows from reverb-drenched yelling to sing-songy, drawn-out cadences to his signature high-speed systematic approach he has to these types of psychedelic trap beats, arguably proving himself a lot more than he did on Man on the Moon III. There are so many tiny moments I can pick out from this track alone, like that anthemic, quotable hook to the little nuances in Carti's verse, like that silence that cuts deep through his hashtag-rap murmuring. "I had to change my swag... ... ... ... metamorphosis". This is one of many moments spread across this album where Carti uses empty space to emphasise how so far detached he is from reality, or at least this vampire caricature Carti seems to play. Carti flows gorgeously over these hums and yes, it's rough around the edges and kind of awkward, but that is an attempt to express a constant stream of money, women and drugs in a creative way. It can't be robotic or professional because it's not as glamorous as some music videos and some rappers - including Kanye and Future - might want you to think. It simply can't be, and Carti, in his typical unsubtle way, gets that across perfectly. These beats are often just a beautiful synth melody or loop, or a genius piano melody like in "Vamp Anthem" and its sample of fucking Bach, overlayed with egregious 808s, Carti sputtering out rap stereotypes and trap percussion... but it never gets old because Carti doesn't give them time to, constantly switching between tracks before you can possibly be as exhausted as he is. It also helps that some of these beats, produced by a range of talents from his signature Maaly Raw and Pi'erre Bourne instrumentals, which are cloudy and ethereal, to a lot of tracks produced by the Working on Dying collective and other producers that seem to have a knack at creating these janky, badly-looped video game beats that sound amateur at points but create a basic foundation for Carti to flourish.

It's at this point in the album where Carti fully embraces that he's on top of the world, and nobody can knock him off that pedestal. When you feel like this, can't nobody tell you shit. He feels like he's God and could also join Slayer, comparing himself to Muhammed Ali to emphasise how he's the greatest, and no-one can get to him. "No Sl33p" acts as another interlude of violent paranoia, wherein he goes to sleep and dreams about murder. These short additions to the track list do not feel out of place within all of the hedonism and rather feel like a brief detour for Carti before he gets back to where he is now, rather than where he was in the hood. By "Meh", his ego has inflated to complete self-obsession. It's only at "Control" where Carti, still deflecting blame for his negligence with women, tries to concede and at an extreme where he offers a woman, presumably Iggy Azalea, pure materialism in exchange for some human connection, love and intimacy. He promises that he can wear a suit for her - as if keeping up appearances is what has ever mattered for Carti - over one of the most inspired beats this year, a brilliant juxtaposition of early 2010s club and dance-pop synths with the hardcore trap percussion and bass, which is in full force for "Punk Monk", in which the disguise falters and the facade falls. He doesn't care about anyone other than himself because he's a rockstar, and in the uncharacteristically long and lyrical verse, he lists off a specific set of rappers in such passing fashion that it becomes unclear whether he's showing genuine admiration or just dissing them, especially with how he thinks not he or his friends drifting apart is the reason why he feels so isolated. He has this idea that everyone above him is taking his friends from him. The label tricked him with Pi'erre, "they" turned Lil TJ against him. It's an us vs. them mentality but skipping the "us" and going straight to the core of the conflict: Playboi Carti himself, who purposefully cuts everyone off, begging everyone not to even contact him because, as he says, that shit's not his business. It would be almost motivational if it wasn't... just sad.

There's something comical but profound about the ugly, boyish tone Carti adopts when he says, "I don't rap, I write poems", before continuing to moan incoherently and repeat himself. Similarly comical and profound is the DJ Akademiks intro on "Control" because he, of all people, is a perfect satire of hip-hop commentary and the culture that hypes up people who genuinely fuck themselves up to the point of Carti's mind state on this album, or even to the point of the tragedy of Juice WRLD. For young hip-hop talents, no-one around them can really be trusted, and if they can, they lead these people in for their own greed and benefit, without paying attention to how these young rappers cope with newfound fame. For all we know, Carti's completely fine, but that isn't that common, and with everyone hyping up and "dickriding" young artists until they feel unstoppable, they feel like Carti on Whole Lotta Red, the only possible trajectory is swiftly downhill.

"On that Time" and "King Vamp" are both bangers with childish hooks and the same mentality that comes with a lot of Carti's sillier refrains, which at this point end up as just spelling out words. The incessant repetition drift away from being choruses and just end up as mantras for you to memorise and repeat when you bump this song. Carti indulges in codeine and ecstasy to the point where he can't feel anything and that no-one can get to him... at all. You'd think Future, an experienced trap-rapper in very much a similar lane and subject matter to Carti, would be able to prick his brain a bit more but instead, he just ends up imitating Carti and feeding into his fantasy. You can't really even tell where Future's usually deep-voiced murmur ends and where Carti's squeaky falsetto nonsense starts on "Teen X". By "Over", he's stuck in a loop over really dull, synth-y beats that don't interest me at all, in fact I would call "Sky" the one dud on the record because whilst it vaguely adds to the narrative, it overstays its welcome far too long for its inclusion to be worth it to me. Those two tracks and "Place" purposefully convey complacency but just end up being sleepy. At least "Over" has the rhetorical "Damn, how the fuck we got back to where we started?"

After "Over", I can't believe I'm saying this, but Carti starts to lyrically pick up an introspective theme that's subtle throughout the record but put on full display over slower, melancholy beats where Carti can spit some genuinely unnerving and haunting bars. The chorus on "ILoveUIHateU" is one of Carti's lyrical highlights throughout the whole discography, not like that has ever mattered to Carti. Regardless of if it matters, Carti definitely continues down this lane on "Die4Guy", where he depicts over a hard, menacing beat, his relationship with Reggie Carter, his brother, and how that inspired his rebellious nature and rockstar attitude, comparing himself to... the entirety of Black Flag in the process. We're invited to watch him spaz over this and just watch in astonishment as Carti acknowledges how reckless and dangerous this is without a care in the world. It's on these final tracks where we understand Carti's progress and why he feels the need to live this lifestyle, giving his history in poverty and how inspiring his family members, particularly brother and mother, have been to him in how they took advantage of the worst situations to give their closest what they deserved, and finally, his "going bananas" feels deserved and we briefly see a Carti a lot closer to Earth, and a lot closer to his hometown of Atlanta. He went through shit to get here, and he'll live life to his fullest as long as he can still get it. "F33l Lik3 Dyin" is an indescribably great track that sees Carti questioning relationships and updating us on his mental health as a perfect closer to the record, with a sample that proves Bon Iver is a perfect fit for any hip-hop. Justin Vernon's incoherent falsetto never gets in the way of Carti's own murmuring, as he mourns his own state of mind, with some really haunting refrains about his own death. His "fuck all y'all" mentality feels warranted by the end of Whole Lotta Red and we as a listener, after being entrenched in his psyche for more than an hour, finally get through to Carti, whether he likes it or not, and what we see is very clearly not what he wants us to.

Whether I see this album as genius story-telling as my tired brain inferred, or just a playlist of vaguely experimental trap bangers, I think I can say with confidence that this is at least my personal favourite of Carti's work by a long shot and I'm really excited to see what he has in store next - if he can even muster up another record in the next couple of years. This album is slap-dash and insane but I'm fucking astonished.

If I die, it's gon' be real sad, so I fuck on my bitch like it's our last

9/10

0 notes