ALBUM REVIEW: Playboi Carti - MUSIC
Whole lotta songs.
It’s incredibly bold to name your album something as simple as MUSIC. That evokes the thought that either you’ve decided your album encompasses all things music, or you just don’t give a damn about having a creative title. Playboi Carti clearly thinks the former of this album, and his long-awaited follow up to 2020’s Whole Lotta Red cranks up his gargantuan vision of trap and pop rap to even bigger levels. MUSIC at times reminds me of why Carti has become the sensation he is, but it dooms itself by stretching itself too thin with filler and guests that don’t always compliment his signature style.
When he’s at his best, Carti is nearly unintelligible over crushingly weird beats. That combo is what powered Whole Lotta Red and it powers the best songs on MUSIC as well. Take “I SEEEEEE YOU BABY BOI” for instance, with its warped synths percolating while Carti vibes out to thoughts of women, drugs and more. He’s no lyrical miracle, but this vibes-based combination takes the album to its best moments. “COCAINE NOSE” goes punk with a vicious guitar riff. A song like “OPM BABI” feels like it’s ready to collapse under a multitude of distorted sounds and voices, but Carti goes baby mode to hold everything together. Further deep cuts like “OLYMPIAN” and “LIKE WEEZY” (where Carti pronounces “pussy” in the most hilarious way possible) give MUSIC peaks that none of his many impersonators could come close to matching.
But for every highlight, there’s a moment that stunts the record’s potential. I bring up WLR again because 1. it’s a great record, but 2. it has a (mostly) cohesive feeling despite being 24 tracks long. Carti’s baby-voiced vampire persona and the vibrantly weird beats keep things as consistent as they can over an hour of music, but six extra songs and 15 extra minutes of music here don’t do the same. He’s all over the place like a madman, whether he’s copying Future’s generic trap shit on “WALK”, ripping through multiple vocal styles on the chaotic “WAKE UP F1LTHY”, or just straight up not even appearing on “TWIN TRIM”, leaving Lil Uzi Vert to fill in on vocals. Other tracks exist solely for playlist filler like “FINE SHIT” or most of the final few songs. Padding a big album like this with songs in your wheelhouse like “MUNYUN” or “CRANK” is fine, but too many of these tracks don’t play to Carti’s strengths.
In addition to not playing to his own strengths on solo songs, Carti ends up deferring to the styles of his guests too. “PHILLY” is a fine trap song but it sounds more like Travis Scott featuring Playboi Carti than the other way around. Same goes for “RATHER LIE” with the Weeknd, and if I wanted croony melodic R&B, I’d rather just listen to Hurry Up Tomorrow. Thankfully Kendrick Lamar’s two features trend more towards Carti than K-Dot, but he’s the exception to the rule. And doesn’t it feel like every event rap album is full of guests these days? I’m not impressed with this amount of features anymore, especially when they’re as inconsistently used as they are here.
(I do like Future’s lines about having to “thumb through horse shit, thumb through cow shit” on the otherwise forgettable “CHARGE DEM HOES A FEE”)
The easy thing to say about MUSIC is it’s too long, and one day I’ll do an intense research project to find out just how many songs on an album is too many. But the real disappointment of this album is its regression in substance. Too many different undercooked songs on a record that took almost five years to get here. Sure there are several vibe-worthy tracks, but having to pick through the mediocrity abound doesn’t make them worth it. I’d rather listen to the now oft-mentioned Whole Lotta Red and not wait another five years for something that comes nowhere close to that album’s mystique.
Verdict: 5.5/10
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