What does it mean that the most meaningful and galvanic artist in contemporary rap music often appears to be retreating from the throne?
Playboi Carti recently released his fourth full-length release, “Music,” which has spent most of the last month atop the Billboard album chart. “Music,” which aggregates 30 songs even if it doesn’t quite stitch them together, is a vivid of-the-moment document of the ways hip-hop has been splintering, lyrically and musically, over the past few years.
Carti is a deconstructionist, the latest in a line of Atlanta rappers taking the genre in increasingly chaotic directions. He’s maybe the truest and loudest exponent of the post-Drake realignment of hip-hop — indebted to Travis Scott’s amplified yelps, the skittishness of several microgenerations of SoundCloud rap, the growth of rap festival culture and its emphasis on physicality, and the way fans on the internet now aggregate around obscurity as much as ubiquity.
For these tumultuous times, Carti is a king, even if he’s more often in hiding from than courting the spotlight. “Music” is a reflection of his ambivalence about that fate. In part, it’s a doubling down on the things that have made him so special — vocal tics, insistent shards of rhyme, a sense that he’s retreating even as he’s moving forward. But it also reflects his growing profile and the obligations, or at least opportunities, that come with it, with the addition of several well-known guests.
Whereas his last album, the scene-defining “Whole Lotta Red” from 2020, had a single-mindedness that verged on hardcore, “Music” is less focused, and attempts to solve several problems at once.
For years, Carti has been playing with voices and with the technology that renders them ever more bizarre. In between albums, he drizzled out leaks and loosies, often most thrilling for how he would reinvent his style of rapping, seemingly on the fly. On this album, he’s using several distinct voices — a robust croak on “Trim,” a hard bark on “Philly,” a nasal chirp on “K Pop,” a wet and sleazy smear on the excellent “Cocaine Nose.” He’s chameleonic, demonstrating that, in this corner of hip-hop at least, identity is no longer as wrapped up in stylistic consistency as it long was. That’s true in his choice of production as well. Songs like “Like Weezy” and “Walk” channel earlier generations of Atlanta rap, while “Opm Babi” and “Pop Out” are industrially noisy, in defiance of melody.
If anything, Carti has been defined by what he long hasn’t done: let outsiders into his world. But on “Music,” Carti is at a kind of crossroads in this regard as well. He is yanking more conventional stars into his orbit — Kendrick Lamar is here, as are Travis Scott and the Weeknd — but Carti barely concedes an inch. And wisely, the guests don’t attempt to mimic his style; they simply want the refracted shine. For the most part, those songs, while accessible, feel superfluous and lightly heretical.
These dalliances with better known and more famous elders suggests Carti has at least an inclination toward broader attention, even if his relation to stardom is idiosyncratic at best.
But reluctant leaders still cultivate followers. You hear the tentacles of Carti’s reach all over the rage-rap underground. It’s there directly on “More Chaos” by the Atlanta rapper Ken Carson, who is signed to Carti’s Opium imprint, and more circuitously on “Star” by the young electro-pop singer 2hollis.
Of the two main rappers signed to Carti’s label — the other is Destroy Lonely — Carson is the riskier and friskier. His strong 2023 album, “A Great Chaos,” displayed a curiosity about song structure not shared by many of his peers.
But mostly Carson is pure id, a logical step in the rage-rap lineage beginning with Scott and trickling down through Carti. His music is part of a movement, in at least this corner of hip-hop, away from narrative or melody or even words into something far more physical and pugnacious. In the same way that festival-sized EDM pummeled away the nuances of club music’s many delicate subscenes, hip-hop’s rage-rap corner is designed to be experienced in the pit at Rolling Loud. Plenty of the songs on “More Chaos” function as code for how to jostle up against 10,000 other rowdy people for a jolt of controlled anarchy — they’re exhortations to mosh first and foremost.
On the first half of the album, especially, the production is deep fried and even more deeply addled, with bass textures that throb beyond the boundaries of conventional speakers, and almost no space between sounds. The beats are claustrophobic and messy — they leave no room for breath, or perspective. The prevailing mood is agitated anxiety.
Carson lacks Carti’s innovative spirit, or his outright oddity — he’s simply living in one of the lanes Carti chiseled out five years ago. Mostly, he raps like he’s still learning to rap, at times reduced to spaced-out chanting: “Money spread, money spread, money spread,” “I’m a Black rock star, I’m a Black rock star, I’m a Black rock star.” Several songs fade out while he’s still rapping, as if tying up the thoughts were too much labor.
The back half of the album is more lyrically vivid; there are flickers of warmth and even self-doubt on “Kryptonite” and “Thx.” But the beats still relentlessly pummel the listener, making “More Chaos” not an album qua album, nor even an album qua playlist, but rather album as soundtrack for an experience — it’s why the details don’t much matter.
Last year, Carson took 2hollis on tour as an opening act, and the videos of his sets that spread on TikTok and Instagram were rowdy and intense. The Los Angeles artist makes ecstatic electro-pop with lightly gothic overtones — its busyness is indebted to the sort of pinball-machine production Carti helped popularize, but 2hollis, who both sings and raps, imposes brightly gasping, and sometimes flirtatious, vocals on those sounds.
No matter how sensual or ecstatic 2hollis sounds, like on the fame meditation “Tell Me” or the winking “Nice,” there’s an underlying sense of anxiety just below the surface. And even when his songs lean into other influences — crunchy big-tent EDM, whiny pop-emo, early ’90s club music — it’s still music designed for rowdy crowds.
Of these two tributaries of Carti’s influence, 2hollis’s is the more opaque and indirect one. It understands his music as a method of absorption, a call to physical attention. Internet-driven fame is a curious evolution — it’s easier than ever to have a couple of quick hits, then rapidly be performing to 10,000 fans losing their minds and bodies. But that doesn’t exempt young stars from evanescence. Carti, Carson and 2hollis are testing the waters of what might come next. When the crowds have already assembled, what will you do with them? Keep on raging, or create a bigger tent.
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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