I was watching the moon bleed on Thursday as midnight EST became midnight PST became 2 am, 3 am, falling asleep with the lights on, waiting for MUSIC. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, or worse, glazing, Playboi Carti is among the few musicians big enough to make fans wait years between albums without losing relevance, and may be one of the only willing to practice the restraint this necessitates. In recent years, even music’s biggest stars (Beyonce, Taylor Swift) have taken to a much brisker clip of releases; in absentia, Carti has become a figure akin to Frank Ocean or Rihanna for his followers.
Overstuffed, overwrought, overproduced, overly trim — the sprawl of MUSIC suggests an artist determined to mean something to everyone. There are still plenty of the nuclear 808s and abraded synthesizers that characterized WLR alongside a raft of giddy EDM moments, date night mood setters, and pop and hip-hop radio plays besides (the former, with the Weeknd, is excellent; the latter, with Ty Dolla $ign and Young Thug, is beyond execrable). Perhaps most invigorating has been the new work’s integration of early 2010s trap, drawing heavily on the sonics of Rich Kidz and Gucci Mane, among others. There’s SWAMP IZZO! of course, but even as early as winter 2024’s surreal singles run, the martial stomp of “HBA” signaled that Carti was “coming normal,” bringing things back to his Atlanta roots.
It’s less cohesive than his previous albums, and the pivots from song to song can be confusing beyond the first galvanic gasp of whiplash. But despite the occasional overtures to his newly minted pop status (one imagines the “Popular”/”EVIL J0RDAN” mashup will go crazy on the Weeknd’s tour), much of MUSIC veers closer to DatPiff heyday in its tones and tropes. Just listen to the diabolical horns of “RADAR,” buoyed by a sinister theremin, or the Spaceghostpurpp-everting “CRANK,” as if Carti just hopped out of a cryogenic chamber after a 15 year nap.
When MUSIC isn’t busy modernizing mp3-era chaos, it’s chaotically modern, pinging from one idea to the next like signals between satellites: “OPM BABI” is essentially a demonic skaiwater song, and the starstruck surge of “I SEEEEEE YOU BABY BOI” dials the head-over-heels rush of “Sky” up to 11. Through it all, Carti’s flow cycles through breathy whispers and diaphragmatic bellows, gruff Future cosplay and baby-voiced falsettos. Even where he leans more copy-paste, as with Travis Scott feature “PHILLY,” his delivery prevents the song from lapsing into anonymity. Falling into a K-hole never sounded so energizing.
In interviews over the last few years, Carti has described his music as being about universal themes (love, sex, drugs, life changes) and made it clear the live show is where most of his attention is trained. You might consider MUSIC a world-beating expansion to the ideas of WLR in much the same way that Die Lit iterated upon the stylistic inventions of his self-titled 2017 mixtape. It’s the question every musical iconoclast faces: when you put out a paradigm-shifting album, how do you get bigger from there?
In Carti’s wake, myriad artists ranging from genuinely inventive musicians to unabashed copycats have found success making rage rap. Broadly, they’ve taken the sounds pioneered by WLR and made them harder, darker, louder, the decibels inching up in a war of volume. It feels like an apt parallel for the increasing numbness of information inundation, the endless stream of music and memes and news and ideas, how our synapses are fried and unresponsive until jabbed particularly hard.
Carti isn’t shy to have his producers press a big red button, but MUSIC seems committed to a more mindful copresence, the urgency of its songs matched to the immediacy of their release. Carti’s contortive flows reward attentive listening, and every sonic element (blown out 808s, pristine toplines, abrupt pacing shifts, carefully deployed DJ tags) seems maximized to keep listeners engaged. If Carti sees his live show as the most important part of his career, then each facet — not just the sound, or the pyrotechnics, but the moshpits, the body heat, the strobing lights blinding still through thickets of fog — is a critical component of the oeuvre.
It’s Sunday night and the crowd at Rolling Loud California is restless, bored. They’re whispering that Carti just landed in LA 15 minutes ago, that the curfew will cut his set short. Then, the enormous 808s of “POPOUT” hit and we all swarm forward. I watch a kid clamber up a lighting rig next to the soundbooth to get a better vantage point as the moshing begins; he’s up there for at least a couple songs, though when he comes down, I can’t say — I’m swimming to the front.
The crowd is electric, even if the only songs that seem to trigger truly riotous reactions are those with hard hitting drums; the cinematic sweep of “CRUSH” falls a little flat, perhaps because it lacks a dramatic beat drop. A bunch of people will end up passing out (or tweaking out) by the time the show is over, but live on the ground, things never feel too aggro, just incredibly cramped. It isn’t exactly exercise in the moment, but my muscles never fully relax, jostling for position and dampening shockwaves of crowd motion. We’re all competing for a better spot, but people are helpful if not quite polite — whenever someone falls, hands reflexively reach out to yank them up, and despite the occasional misplaced limb, everyone is a good sport about the skin-to-skin contact (when I get home, my hoodie is drenched despite barely having sweat myself). Any time he drops an old song, like “Stop Breathing,” pits yawn open and gnash shut again, bodies colliding with abandon.
In the midst of this, the giant screens bearing down on us blaring pure white light. Days later, I’m reminded of Franz Liszt, how the frenzy of his fans was so stark as to seem pathological in 1840. Not much has changed since — every one of us at the show got as close as we could, inch by inch, desperate to see this guy with our own two eyes, unmediated by cameras or liquid crystal display. Hearing the music isn’t enough. Feeling the music isn’t enough.
He knows this. And he knows we’ve been waiting. He’s relishing every second of it. The screen will occasionally flash a whirling drone shot, thousands of tiny smartphones held aloft sniping the same target. “I need everybody to put they camera lights in the air,” Carti will declare a couple of times throughout the night. His onstage posse is an IYKYK rolodex of OPIUM signees, producers, stylists, and orbiters; later, he’ll bring out the Weeknd to do 2.5 songs in the SoFi Stadium parking lot and Kai Cenat to do crowd control when things get too hectic.
I’ve seen Carti on the Whole Lotta Red tour, where I lost 80% of my voice, and on the Die Lit tour, where I was quite literally moshed out of my sneakers (this happened again on Sunday, too), but this felt different. Not necessarily more intense physically, but the psychic energy was unreal, like: He really dropped the album. We’re really here hearing him perform this music for the first time ever. You start to understand why Spotify’s marketing video was captioned “HAVE FAITH.”
Songs I previously dismissed, like “Type Shit,” were suddenly unlocked; when he cued up “DIFFERENT DAY,” and “PLAY THIS,” personal favorites that didn’t make the final album on DSPs, he hovered. I got knocked over twice, once sandwiched between two people bigger than me and once where my glasses slipped off my sweaty face (disgustingly, other people’s perspiration, not my own) in a panic-inducing instant. Three days later, every muscle in my back remains brutally sore.
“I appreciate everybody waiting for that shit,” Carti will tell us a little before the end. When he performs “OLYMPIAN” it feels like a victory lap, but when he drops “Long Time,” it feels transcendent. “We deserve this shit, n***a, I swear to god we deserve this shit,” he crows into the mic. “All those long nights in the studio? All those years waiting for me to drop? Let’s do this motherfucker!” If he takes another five years for the next one, we’ll always have MUSIC.
