MUSIC and the Eternal 2017

Some loosely collected thoughts on Playboi Carti's MUSIC

Some housekeeping: It’s been a long time since Never Hungover has hit the inbox, which, apologies, hopefully that won’t happen again. Since I last posted, I had the opportunity to report a piece on the Super Bowl in New Orleans for the Los Angeles Review of Books. I’m proud with how it turned out, and I hope you enjoy reading it. It’s better than the New Yorker one.

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Depending on who you ask, I am either 2 months younger or 10 months older than Playboi Carti; either way you cut it, I am about 7 years past the age at which point it feels acceptable to share one’s opinion about Playboi Carti’s music on the internet. Or so, at least, I had been led to believe when I pressed play last Friday on MUSIC, torn between my being buoyed by a full night of sleep and my sense of survivor’s guilt that I, rather than any of my broccoli-haired interlocutors who had stayed up all night in anticipation of the album’s release, would hear it first.

The blistering buzzsaw “POP OUT” felt like a sort of baptism by fire into the most rabidly anticipated event album in recent memory; every generation, it seems, gets the “On Sight” it deserves. Before I had time to collect my bearings, I had made my way through the A-side of an album that seemed to metamorphose roughly ten times in front of my eyes, toggling through robotic slide-whistles and operatic choirs, joy-dimming Travis Scott ad libs and boisterous Swamp Izzo shit-talking, a laugh-out-loud preposterous fan-edited intro and, well, the Shai aura edit song. By the time I had reached the deliriously blown-out, almost breathtakingly avant garde “OPM BABI,” I felt I had been fully initiated into the brainrot purportedly the hallmark of the generational cohort beneath me. MUSIC, upon these first few listens, was totalizing, overpowering, nonsensical, and endlessly captivating. Listening to MUSIC felt like those moments when your phone or computer so completely occludes the world outside it that your scrolling induces a sort of flow state; time evaporates, external stimuli fade into the distance, and your mind is able to jump from corner to disparate corner effortlessly, so long as the dopamine keeps flowing. You pick your head up, you realize you have listened to a 30-song album, and you take a moment to regain your bearings.

It’s tempting, with a record as promising yet confounding as MUSIC, to wash your hands a bit; to call yourself unc, to fetishize youth by proclaiming the record is for the kids, to undercut your making sense of the record with a certain ironic detachment. Both the album and its attendant fanfare make these things easy. But where Playboi Carti’s first three records strike the balance between obvious timelessness and immediately recognizable paradigm shifts in popular hip-hop, MUSIC appears to offer no such path forward. To observe this is not to accuse the record, or Carti himself, of failing—one artist can only be expected to shift the zeitgeist so many times—but rather to see clearly what it is and is not. MUSIC is not bold, well-conceived, or intentional enough to mark a step forward for even the most committed Carti clones; what, compared to Whole Lotta Red, would its program even look like? Rather, it is best understood as a sort of crystallization of a moment in culture: what we might call the Eternal 2017 with 2025 tendencies.

The clearest sign that MUSIC identifies itself more as a victory lap than a meaningful step forward is its geriatric guest list. While some of the record’s personnel decisions feel like dispatches from a more just universe—the biggest album of 2025 being hosted by Swamp Izzo feels, all things considered, like a minor miracle—MUSIC’s features are among the most ill-conceived aspects of a work so simultaneously compelling and ill-conceived. Throughout MUSIC’s A-side, Travis Scott is deployed at increments seemingly strategically intended to suck the air out of the album’s budding momentum. Hearing the platonically uninspired “PHILLY,” I am reminded of the time a visibly drunk Uber driver picked my girlfriend and I up at 5am while playing an AI-generated Travis Scott album on Youtube to which he knew all of the words (the line I’ll never forget being “she just want my money and my dick, ya-ha”); the AI-generated album was significantly better. Elsewhere, Lil Uzi Vert continues his years-long struggle to find his footing and Future overwhelmingly sleepwalks through verses. Most heartbreakingly, Young Thug phones in a clunker inexcusably entitled “WE NEED ALL DA VIBES,” an interminable three minutes nestled within what otherwise would be the album’s strongest, most coherent stretch. Somewhat miraculously, Kendrick Lamar finds a way to neither annoy nor feel out of place; elsewhere, the The Weeknd-assisted ballad “RATHER LIE” buts in like a YouTube ad. It’s hard, in other words, to shift the paradigm when seven of your record’s thirty tracks include either Travis Scott or Kendrick Lamar. Not one guest on MUSIC is able to upstage, challenge, elevate, or even constructively complicate Playboi Carti, a failing inextricable from the fact that this parade of a-listers who somehow retain a chokehold over popular rap music are closer to the Michael Rubin white party stage of their careers than they are to anything approaching artistic vitality.

It would be entirely unfair to accuse MUSIC of being more of the same, because Carti is too talented and singular an artist to make something one could consider “the same.” Even at his least inspired, like the above-mentioned Weeknd pop swing, Carti is capable of the sort of tone modulation, structural inversion, and stylistic freakout that occasionally takes your breath away. MUSIC is unfocused, but it does not drag. What it does sound like, however, is an elevated version of the rap we have come to expect since, roughly speaking, 2017, when Migos’ Culture marked the subsumption of the budding, frenetic, outre Atlanta rap world into streaming culture’s frictionless, venture-capitalistic approach to record-building. For the first time in MUSIC, Playboi Carti seems to have made a record dictated by the mode of culture around him rather than one that will challenge or shift that culture; MUSIC is a record without a unifying stylistic sensibility, one evidently slapped together at the last minute, and comprised of a track list assembled without any obvious logic or organization. At its best, MUSIC pushes these hallmarks well beyond their logical extremes. MUSIC is rife with turbo-charged, inverted tropes: Carti’s deep voice ad libs against his baby voice, the way in which “MUNYUN” dissolves into a flurry of ad-libs and Swamp Izzo tags, the hat-tip samples of “COCAINE NOSE” and “LIKE WEEZY,” the grandeur of “OLYMPIANS” and the previously-mentioned high-water pandemonium of “OPM BABI.” And yet whether or not MUSIC, like the records we have come to expect in the Long 2017, does in fact exist to throw a bunch of tracks at the wall and see what sticks, the reality is that it looks an awful lot like the records that do.

In what I consider a seminal piece of rap criticism, Andrew Nosnitsky articulated the instinct pervasive among both rap artists and fans in the internet era to self-consciously chase “classic” status. In the piece, Noz establishes a sort of divide between the self-consciously, striving modern classic and the record that, over time, comes to be understood as a classic for the way in which it exemplifies a discrete moment or scene within rap music. With an artist like Carti, and in a media environment as degraded as ours, it can be easy to rush to anoint; at the same time, enough people were wrong about the generation-defining Whole Lotta Red that we may well also see a hushed hesitation—a sort of moratorium on serious critical proclamations until we can assess whether or not MUSIC in fact shifted youth culture. MUSIC, at the end of the day, is not that complicated. MUSIC is good, and it may be great, but it is not in a meaningful sense new; Carti’s is a more capable, polished, and inspiring vision of the long 2017 hegemony, but it is one all the same. If MUSIC is ever viewed in an ostensibly classic light, it will likely be for what it marked the end of: it may well be that MUSIC is the last great event album, insofar as it represents popular rap’s last great album-maker’s departure from the album as such. And so we might put to bed, once and for all, the joke that there is an age limit on enjoying Carti’s music: I recognize MUSIC because I have been hearing a worse version of it for the last eight years.