Playboi Carti, Whole Lotta Red & The Curse of Perfection.
Playboi Carti, a polarising artist created ‘Die Lit’, an even further polarising album, yet still widely known as some of Playboi Carti’s best work to date.
Marmite, although cliched, is the best way to describe it, you either love it or you hate it. There is no inbetween.
Die Lit was released May 11 2018. It is the 17th of July as i start this piece, almost an entire 7 months since the long awaited Christmas Day release of Carti’s 4th album: ‘Whole Lotta Red’. An album that despite being catchy for the most part was ultimately a let down for the Carti community due somewhat to its lack of quality in general mixed with its numerous delays and clearly rushed & random release date.
‘Whole Lotta Red’ or WLR for short was announced to be in the works in 2018, a few months after the release of ‘Die Lit’, which means it actually released almost 2 and a half years later, one of many factors that went towards the massive amount of disappointment felt by his core fan base when it was finally ready for ears.
This piece will detail what i like to call ‘The Curse of Perfection’ touting the struggle rappers go through, or namely, what Playboi Carti went through trying to follow up what is easily some of his best work in ‘Die Lit’
What is the Curse of Perfection ?
The curse of perfection is the issue many artists have to deal with when releasing a quality and extremely well received piece of work, then having to follow it up with more or at least similar quality music. it sounds like its something that should just be naturally expected but can be much more difficult than you'd imagine.
Many artists have suffered immensely with this concept despite remaining big & popular artists, such as Drake since ‘Views’ in 2016, Meek Mill since ‘Dreams & Nightmares’ in 2012 & Kanye West since ‘The Life of Pablo’ in 2016, whereas some artists have gone from strength to strength, releasing a greatly acclaimed album and then going on to release similar or even higher quality music after, such as Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, Freddie Gibbs & Jay-Z.
I don’t think the audiences generally notice how difficult it must be to put lots of time and effort into a a project for it to receive many plaudits, only to put in what the artist probably sees as the same if not similar effort and have it be compared to the old and therefore criticised for not being the same. I do however think the audience are well within their right to criticise a lack of quality as in many cases they pay their hard earned money to consume music in the long run.
Carti falls into the latter for me and many others, going from strength to strength in ‘Playboi Carti’ & ‘Die Lit’ before following it up with an underwhelming, extremely late, poorly mixed and poorly constructed album in WLR. However, we shall delve into why:
Die Lit
Wow. ‘Die Lit’. Arguably one of the best Rap/Trap albums of the 2010’s, despite the unnecessary features from the likes of Nicki Minaj & Chief Keef, Die Lit is a massively faultless album for the most part, as long as you learn not to expect the world from someone such as Carti, not everyone is capable of a ‘Rodeo’ or a ‘GKMC’, but we got ‘Die Lit’ instead and it was exactly what many of his fan base needed.
From what is now widely known as the “Carti Anthem” in ‘Long Time — Intro’, to the heavy, somewhat unnecessarily aggressive ‘R.I.P’, the double cup glorifying ‘Lean 4 Real’, to the gloriously repetitive, braggadocios, slow burner that is ‘Old Money’, arguably the best four track run on the album as the first few tracks, you’re thrown deep into Carti’s already shallow subject matter immediately & without warning.
Despite the fact that i believe the project does slightly drag on a little due to the fact the best songs are at the beginning or at least the first half of the album, its not enough to tarnish the general quality of the album altogether.
‘Die Lit’ is what you'd expect from a trap album, let alone a Carti album. hard hitting beats, repetitive but catchy lyrics, limited but somewhat relatable subject matter & most importantly Carti’s signature childish & high pitched tone of voice, often referred to as “baby Carti”.
Despite what this piece may make you believe, ‘Die Lit’ however isn't the only project by Carti that would’ve contributed at least slightly to why WLR was so badly recieved.
‘Playboi Carti’
‘Playboi Carti’ the mixtape was released on April 14th 2017 and was met with a wide spread of different views and opinions, one one hand many thought it contributed heavily to the downfall of quality in rap music, whereas others thought that it was exactly what it was aiming to be, a high energy & erratic culmination of music. a break from real life almost, where you could embark on a mindless and baseless journey with Carti to a place where nothing truly mattered and nothing really needed to make sense.
Carti took the ad-lib era of music and ran with it, unleashing an entire new level to that era. The album feels almost entirely made up of infectious sounds and noises, even the lyrics themselves sound like ad-libs, so incredibly repetitive and catchy it makes them hard to forget.
The type of lyrics and sounds you find yourself somehow slipping into normal conversations on your day to day.
The mixtape included the hit song ‘Magnolia’ which that year was awarded ‘Best New track’ by Pitchfork. a song widely remebered for its lyric “In New York i milly rock” an iteration of the original ‘milly rock’ soundtrack by ‘2milly’ which released two years prior in 2015.
The project also included features from Lil Uzi Vert & A$AP Rocky with heavy production by Pi’erre Bourne and has since been ceritifed as a Platinum selling project by the RIAA highlighting its great success.
One of the most important things about Playboi Carti and the self titled mixtape itself was that for the most part it felt as though it was one of the first few real life crystallisations of the Soundcloud era, almost like a beacon of hope for that community of young artists and rappers in particular, a real manifestation from Underground to Mainstream, which, despite the obvious negative connotations around being mainstream in the rap industry, is the obvious goal for many.
Leaks
As is the case with many artists since the internet & streaming era, music gets leaked, but for a long time it genuinely seemed as though no artists music was getting leaked as much as Carti’s.
Every month a new set of music was released on behalf of Carti all over the internet, and unfortunately, once it’s out, it’s out. That’s it. Thousand upon thousands will hear it within hours and the song is now an official leak.
I add this segment almost as maybe an excuse for Carti. It’s well discussed that some of Carti’s leaks actually contain some of his best and most well written music, from the likes of ‘Houdini’, ‘Cash Shit’, ‘Vlone Jacket’ & the world renowned and extremely popular ‘Pissy Pamper’ a song that despite never actually getting an official release, rocked the rap world for about 4/5 months before fans realised it would probably never get an official release and the hype died off.
This isn’t to say that the ‘disasterclass’ that was WLR can be excused by the two years worth of leaks, but when you consider how popular these leaked songs were and the fact that they were probably meant to be on the original concept of Whole Lotta Red, it gives a small case for Carti as to say, maybe the album would’ve been a whole lot better if not for the constant leaks his music went through, but, hindsight is 20/20 so it’s pointless to go down that route.
Whole Lotta Red
Whole. Lotta. Red. An incredibly hyped piece of music from a very talented and heavily judged artist. Carti fans expected the world and received nothing more than a very small town at best. But what went wrong on WLR ?
As a fan of Carti myself, I can appreciate the fact that he tried to go down a different route creatively, with a style that took heavy influence from artist & bands such as Slash, Gene Simmons & KISS, while still being a primarily rap based album. He not only managed to do none of those artists justice, but he also managed to paint himself in an incredibly negative light as a rapper.
One thing that saved Carti from the usual lyrical judgement of a rapper, was that his music had incredible production and was incredibly catchy with ad-libs that were extremely hard to forget. WLR had very little, if not NONE of that, most songs were either catchy but incredibly annoying and hard to listen to completely or were just unlistenable altogether, with the occasional ‘Slayer’ or ‘iloveuihateu’ that were somewhat bearable.
Not only were most songs hard to listen to, but for the most part they were also poorly mixed and the production value was awful for the most part, with Carti either being too far above the beat or the beat being too far above him, to go along with the constant straining of his own voice, which sounded very uncomfortable to listen to. Also, the vampire aesthetic that he went for, despite being courageously adventurous, was incredibly cringe & difficult to comprehend.
The album was also badly sequenced, to the point where fans themselves were either creating versions of songs with intro’s on YouTube or were forming their own playlists in the order that most of the songs clearly should’ve gone.
(Honourable mention; Nobody on this earth wants DJ Akademiks in their ears when listening to any album ever.)
Now despite the many flaws this album did have, I once again have to applaud the many risks that this album actually took, a heavily rock related and apparent vampire enthused rap album is something hardly any rap fans would’ve ever heard of and it deserves a level of respect for an artist already as heavily judged as Playboi Carti to go for it, however along with that we must point out that it was a failed venture and didn’t work out anywhere near the extent that he would’ve wanted it to.
It’s hard to compare this album to the other projects Carti released as it took an entire different direction to them. For arguments sake WLR is hopefully a small blip musically for Carti and he’ll either perfect this idea he was going for or return back to what people fell in love with him for. It was always going to be difficult to follow up Die Lit.
Conclusion
As I reach my conclusion I must point out that as I complete this piece it is now the 8th September 2021. Carti has recently been featured on Kanye West’s long awaited DONDA, and done great justice to both features, as well as announcing a new project named NARCISSIST, due to release within the next few weeks. Very exciting times & lots to look forward to hopefully for hardcore Carti fans.
Music is subjective, I’m sure there are many people who loved and appreciated WLR like it was their own son. Regardless, it’s still ok to take a deep dive into the obvious issues and mistakes within a piece of music. This wasn’t written in the hope that people stop listening to WLR, I sure won’t be.
Carti reached his pinnacle at this point with ‘Die Lit’ and as much as we can appreciate his stylistic change of approach on WLR, it was always going to be hard to compete with what was already an incredible piece of music. He wasn’t the first artist to struggle with this & he won’t be the last, hence why I relate him to: The Curse of Perfection.
