4 things we learned from Playboi Carti’s MUSIC

The internet was starting to panic. Playboi Carti had promised that his album MUSIC would drop on Friday, March 14. After weeks of buildup involving advertisements, rap gossip accounts promising new music, and errant Instagram comments from Carti himself, he’d even tweeted that the album would arrive. Then, one minute after midnight EST, he tweeted again: “12 0CLOCK PST.” Under normal circumstances, a three-hour delay wouldn’t be a big deal. But this was Playboi Carti, a rapper who had blown through release dates and promises of new music several times in the nearly five years since releasing Whole Lotta Red. People started to wonder if it was coming at all.

Sure enough, there was another delay. 3 a.m. came and went without a glimpse of new music. Aware of the mounting fury, Carti began corresponding with live streamers like Kai Cenat, sharing updates and playing new music. Sample clearances were the cause of the delay, Carti said, insisting that he’d uploaded the album and that it would be in the hands of fans soon. At around 7:30 a.m. EST, MUSIC appeared online.

It’s not surprising that Carti’s delivered a huge project: 30 songs spanning nearly 77 minutes. Hip-hop’s elite has converged to deliver this album: there are blockbuster features from The Weeknd, Future, and three verses from Travis Scott and Kendrick Lamar apiece. Production comes from longtime Carti collaborator F1lthy, as well as Cardo Got Wings and Metro Boomin, among many others. There’s a lot about the album that will reveal itself after multiple listens, but after the first two, here are four big things that stood out.

Right after dropping Whole Lotta Red back in 2020, Carti hopped on Instagram Live. He bellowed along as “Stop Breathing” played in the background, but his joy soon drained from his face as he read the comments. “THIS ALBUM IS FUCKING SHIT.” “idk if i’m rocking with WLR.” “This shit ass.” Carti couldn’t have known in that moment that “Stop Breathing” would go on to become one of the best-loved songs on an album that would, eventually, be regarded as a modern classic. But for a short period of time just after WLR‘s release, it seemed as though he’d finally slipped up, and in a major way.

For better or worse, MUSIC is not as significant a shift in Carti’s sound. He’s not pioneering a subgenre like WLR did for rage rap. It’s Playboi’s attempt to dominate to zeitgeist rather than shift it, his attempt to blot out the sun from every angle. It’s more of a sequel to Die Lit in that respect, pooling together a bunch of different styles into one epic-length package.

The night before MUSIC‘s premiere, Carti declared “I’m the Travis Scott of Atlanta after this” during a stream with DJ Akademiks. Listening to MUSIC, this statement is revealing: MUSIC feels intentionally crafted to be Carti’s Atlanta-based equivalent to Astroworld. Like Scott’s full-length tribute to Houston, MUSIC is rooted in its hometown with an eye on the pop charts. It also shares a large volume of guest features, a big shift from Whole Lotta Red‘s relatively spartan guest list.

Still, Carti keeps things rooted in the soil of his hometown. Atlanta DJ and local legend Swamp Izzo hosts the project mixtape style, and there are a few other overt nods to the city’s past. The beat for the Metro Boomin-produced “RADAR” could have been ripped from prime era Jeezy, and on “TOXIC,” Skepta shouts out another local legend: “We got the club going up every day like Makonnen.” The highlight, though, comes on “Like Weezy” with its joyous sample of “Bend Over” by Rich Kidz, a key duo in Atlanta rap. And Carti is himself, of course, part of that lineage now and has been for awhile, making the inclusions of the 2023 singles “HBA” and “EVILJ0RDAN” feel like full circle moments.

I’ve been waiting nearly a decade for SpaceGhostPurrp to get the flowers he deserves. The Florida rapper and producer is nearly singlehandedly responsible for any underground rap that uses menacing sounds or aesthetics, but for various reasons, Purrp just doesn’t have the profile befitting his contributions. Hopefully that’ll change now that he’s been sampled on one of the biggest rap albums of the last few years: The beat for “Crank,” produced by Cardo Got Wings, sports a prominent excerpt of Purrp’s “Fuck Taylor Gang” from his germinal mixtape Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6. Cardi is at his crudest and flashiest here, and he does justice to the beat’s still potently hellish vibe.

The appearance of Kendrick Lamar on a Playboi Carti album shouldn’t be so surprising. With a four-and-a-half year wait for its release, MUSIC couldn’t be anything other than Carti’s shot at rap’s pantheon. And it’s not as though Lamar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, has been anything other than open for his appreciation of rap made for catching a vibe, appearing on songs with Rich The Kid and Fredo Santana and showing love to Rae Sremuurd or TisaKorean. Unfortunately, his appearances on Music are mostly misses.

Lamar tries a bunch of different modes here, and none quite work. His role as Carti’s hype man on “MOJO JOJO” is great in theory, lacklustre in execution — as genius a writer as Lamar clearly is, he may not be built for adlibs. And I was shocked when I first heard “BACKD00R”: with its aqueous sample forming the main melody, the beat sounds like it was composed for Lamar’s nemesis, Drake. “GOOD CREDIT,” the most Opium-sounding of the three songs, is a better meshing of Carti and Lamar’s worlds. Lamar laughs and chatters like a freestyling Dr Frankenstein over sinister techno melodies and thumping drums, bragging about carrying weight like “Luka Dončić” and declaring Carti his “evil twin.” What it lacks in natural chemistry, it makes up with sheer weight of their respective charismas.