I.
On October 15, 2019, 421 days after revealing his next album would be titled Whole Lotta Red, Playboi Carti posted a series of photos on Instagram, his first post of the year.1 In these photos, Carti's hair is dyed blonde, he wears a black fur jacket, red leather pants, and a diamond cross earring, and he poses with his eyes cast downward, a hand on his hip. The post's caption read "him <3 red incoming .". The following day, Carti posted again. More selfies and fit pics. A photo of a jacket splayed across a wooden floor; the words "SO" and "CUNT", plastered onto the toe boxes of a pair of Rick Owens sneakers, jut upside down from the bottom of the image. The caption read "*<48hours! locked in.*" Online, a minor frenzy ensued. Carti's fans longingly interpreted the post to mean the album would be released within the next two days. Instead, all that would come from the rapper over the next six months were more Instagram posts. In one series of images, Carti wears a pink denim jacket and the same cross earring. Prosthetic horns emerge from his forehead. The caption read "i jus made 10 vibes<3". Another caption, ".jus shot ah movie", accompanies photos of the rapper in a trench coat, sitting on the hood of a G-Wagon.
None of it was surprising: the teasing, the obfuscation, the indefinite wait. Carti is notorious for moving perpendicular to the dominant model in the streaming and SoundCloud era, when constant engagement and bloat carry favor with both fans and algorithms. He rarely posts on social media, and though his extensive catalog of unreleased music—much of which has been leaked and is bartered as precious commodities on message boards and Discord servers—reveals an artist constantly producing work, his body of officially released music is comparatively small, most of it confined to the two albums and a mixtape he's released in the seven or so years since his music first attracted a significant following. As such, every project is an event.
Yet fans had reason to think 2019 was the year for Whole Lotta Red. In late 2018, while touring for his previous album Die Lit, Carti began performing "Neon" and "Not Real", songs believed to be previews of the new project. Working with familiar producers Maaly Raw and Pi'erre Bourne, both songs are continuations of directions explored on Die Lit. The minimalist, bass-heavy bounce of "Not Real" (originally titled "Molly" by fans) is most reminiscent of "Home (KOD)", while "Neon" features Carti using the high-pitched vocal register that listeners would dub his "baby voice", first noticed on the DL standout "Flatbed Freestyle". The baby voice hysteria would come to a head in April 2019 with the leak of "Kid Cudi" (alternately titled "Pissy Pamper"). Originally a song by rapper Young Nudy featuring Playboi Carti, a version sans Nudy began making the rounds online, with an unofficial upload of this version notably topping Spotify's US Viral 50 chart. Listeners' adoration for the baby voice would quickly reach levels of absurdity most clearly demonstrated by the existence of Genius's video "A Linguist Breaks Down Playboi Carti's Baby Voice". But the response was not unjustified, as the baby voice gave Carti's already garbled, terse flow a degree of novelty and humor that encouraged broader appeal and virality. It was thus assumed Whole Lotta Red would capitalize on this hype while Carti further explored his capacity for shrillness. Tracks, in various states of completion and quality, continued to leak, and impatient fans began to assemble and upload hypothetical versions of the album. Yet months passed and nothing came from Carti but a post every month or so, a vague reminder to fans there was something on the horizon.
On April 14, 2020, Carti posted an image of himself in shadowy profile, sitting before a blue backdrop. A parental advisory sticker in the image's corner led to speculation that this was an album cover. A common refrain found in Instagram comments and message boards: if this is Whole Lotta Red, then why is it blue? Two days later, Carti released the single "@ MEH" alongside a music video, with this image, a still from the video shoot, as cover art. The busy, meandering production by jetsonmade on "@ MEH" is outstanding, providing Carti the (lack of) space to rap in his preferred mode up to that point: as almost an auxiliary to the beat, using ad-libs and infectious vocal manipulation to enrich on a purely sonic level rather than narratively. However, the song's relation to Whole Lotta Red was unclear, as the video seemed a marked departure from the assumed aesthetic identity of the album—blue?—while no mention of the larger project was found in the track's rollout.
Five months later: a selfie reveals Carti's hair is dyed candy red. Months pass. On November 23, alongside a series of images of a microphone set up amidst a cluttered hotel room and the rapper in a suit and tie, Carti announces his album has been turned in. A flurry of posts follow, including: a video of Carti on a balcony, smoking and dancing while previewing a new collaboration with Kanye West; grainy, blurry, washed out selfies and fit pics, Carti's face occluded by red dreads; a short livestream previewing "New Tank", with the rapper dancing for the camera in a mesh tank top; a video debuting the intro to the song "Over", captioned "all My VAMPS sTAND uP ! X"; a series of grainy images of Carti standing before a fire with a Greek cross tattooed on his forehead, his tongue protruding to reveal vampire teeth hanging from his canines. While aesthetic cohesion and a careful consideration of persona were always of key concern for Playboi Carti, this moment signaled a new direction in the rapper's self-fashioning. Gone was the shy, summery, mildly metro it-boy who leaned into the dominant descriptives placed upon him and his work—sublimely naive, compelling yet lacking substance—and here was something else: an emphatically cryptic, nocturnal, truly androgynous character, arousing his audience through symbols and sexual posturing.
In the following weeks, during a stay at Kanye West's ranch in Wyoming, Carti would make a few more posts in this vein, including a series of images and a clip taken of Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre, with Klaus Kinski's pallid demon, isolated in a vast darkness, beaming from Kanye's 100-foot screen. Then, on December 22, an image of Whole Lotta Red's cover art.
The album cover for Whole Lotta Red, designed by Carti's creative director Art Dealer, contains a digitally treated portrait of Playboi Carti, his shoulders turned obliquely from the viewer and his head slightly askew, rendered in stark black and white. His only discernible embellishment is the pendant hanging from his necklace—a cross which hangs upside down—while his lone visible ear extends outwards at its tip, suggesting vampirism. The word "Red", written in a cursive red font that drips blood-like, is scrawled atop Carti's head. The image is surrounded by a thick white border; the top right side contains text that reads "the wonderful world of red" while written on the bottom are the phrases "VOLUME ONE NUMBER ONE", "MAYDAY ISSUE 12/25", and "OPIUM".
As suggested by its editorial format, the cover directly references the first issue of Slash, a punk fanzine that documented the Los Angeles punk scene from 1977 to 1980. Carti's pose, the use of binary image, the bloody title font, and the bottom text are all appropriated from Slash's first cover, which featured Dave Vanian of English band The Damned. While it has long been in vogue for rappers to label themselves rockstars, equating the lifestyles and current status of the rapper as cultural vanguard with that of the rockstar in the seventies, it is safe to say such allusions typically remain within the realm of caricature, drawing upon vague motifs associated with cock rock, hair metal, and the like. In citing a more arcane source from punk's heyday, Whole Lotta Red's cover foregrounds the record in a subcultural lineage that is typically outside the purview of chart-topping hip-hop music, while also hinting at some of the tonal directions Carti will take the listener on the album.
On Christmas Day 2020, Whole Lotta Red was released, and fans were eager to crack open the shell and plunder.
II.
Note:
Penetrating the ineffable obliquely through ill-suited means is the reason to write but nowhere is this more fruitless than in writing about music. As comprehesiveness was an initial aim for this text, here I attempt some musical ekphrasis with a bit of biography and contextualization. I've come to feel this is best left to the critics and Reddit historians. The special thing about music today is that communion with the sublime is there to be experienced at command, endlessly. Just listen.
(a.)
You press play on track one, "Rockstar Made", and the first sound you hear is a loud, distorted bass note that reverberates in the front of the mix, accompanied by a Nextel chirp and then a spectral female voice that murmurs "wake up filthy", the familiar tag of producer F1LTHY of the Philadelphia-based collective Working on Dying. Known for an extensive body of work concocted in the mid-to-late-2010s with seminal underground rappers such as Black Kray, Lucki, and Drain Gang, Working on Dying are the progenitors of a production style referred to as tread, characterized loosely by fast BPMs, heavy bass, complex drum patterns, and lush, meandering synths.2 Hearing F1LTHY's signature off the bat destabilizes you; it's their first collaboration. As the beat progresses, the bass remains dominant, accompanied by intricately arranged hi-hats, tinny, layered synths that sound beamed in from a spacecraft's alarm system, and the persistent jangle of clinking metal, evoking images of heavy chains in constant collision. Carti introduces the album: whole lot, whole lot, whole lot, whole lot. The song's title declares its status as somewhat of an extended caption to the album cover, as Carti chronicles the limit experiences enabled by rockstardom. The hook comes in and Carti chants never too much, a mantra for the just begun twenty-four track, hour-long record in which a menagerie of sounds, inflections, and ideas are thrown at the listener with force.
Though he worked on only a quarter of the album's songs, F1LTHY's contribution to Whole Lotta Red would come to play a defining role in shaping the project's sonic identity. Citing both electronic musician Robert Schröder of the Krautrock-adjacent Berlin School and trap legend Lex Luger as influences, F1LTHY's style is distinct and innovative, refined with time through his own work, as well as fellow Working on Dying members' increasingly high-profile collaborations.3 The production on WLR is a logical progression of the tread sound, as well as the idiosyncratic melodic bounce of frequent Carti collaborator Pi'erre Bourne, who produced a majority of Die Lit. With louder bass, heavy 808 drums, and progressive, atmospheric synths, many of the beats on WLR, which range in tone and schema despite their recurring materials, would come to be ur-texts for a latent production style called "rage beats", coined after the album's release and subsequent flurry of imitators.4 While a multitude of producers worked on Whole Lotta Red, including a cadre of youngsters imported from sites as remote as The Netherlands (Outtatown & star boy), Romania (Lucian), and British Columbia (ssort), the sound is cohesive, with F1LTHY, as elder statesman, credited as chief architect of the album's sonic foundation.
Aside from establishing the tone on "Rockstar Made", F1LTHY co-produced track three, "Stop Breathing", the clear standout of the record's first act. Nowhere is the bass more prominent than here, pulsating continuously while the drum pattern and a revolving array of synths swell beneath the billowing surface. But it's Carti who dominates this one, providing the album's first masterful vocal performance. Carti lifts the track's hook from the Gucci Mane deep cut "Shirt Off", a covert nod to the fellow Atlantan and stylistic forebear: I take my shirt off and all the hoes stop breathing. And what follows is something heretofore rare, even novel in Playboi Carti's corpus—the particular.
Through Self-Titled and Die Lit, one of Carti's distinctions as a rapper was his refusal to be specific.5 It's clear Carti held the daring belief that, because his voice is beautiful and engaging as an instrument unto itself, his music was good despite the often bland and impersonal qualities of his lyrics. To catalog every instance in which Carti rapped in straightforward platitudes about lean or oral sex between 2014 and 2019 would be nothing short of Sisyphean. Yet his bars, through willful genericism and repetition, demonstrated a non-linguistic sensibility, in which the uttering of words produced feeling not through content, but purely through their sonic shape and qualities. While such an idea is far from foreign to musicality or other modes of aural expression, it had yet to be explored in hip-hop music to the extent to which Carti took it, treading on territory that traditionalists would consider outside the bounds of rapping as form. For Carti, lyrics were not meaningful objects; they were a series of generically interchangeable models from which meaning could be extracted through modulation and manipulation. Until "Stop Breathing", until Whole Lotta Red.
Ever since my brother died / I've been thinking 'bout homicide. Referring implicitly to the death of a close friend, Carti proceeds to name check his fellow crew members, both jailed and free. Riding in a tank on 285, Carti describes gang activities using specificities in name and place that tow the hazy, jagged border between fiction and memoir. To be sure, Carti does not abandon his emphasis on vocal experimentation—far from it. On the track's lone extended verse, Carti delivers his vocals in what can best be described as a gravelly yell, interspersed with moments when limits are found and yell becomes yelp: blicky blicky. As engaging as his bars are his ad-libs, a continuous chant of exaggerated breaths and whats in a guttural, brattish snarl that will return throughout the album. Beginning to end, the song is a tour de force, a distillation of pure energy and an unimpeachable demonstration of Carti's vocal virtuosity that highlights the alien, surreal beauty of his voice. Carti describes the strange, transcendent life of a superstar rapper through language that is strange in its deep referentiality, and in a manner wholly transcendent. Through the incorporation of the personal and the specific, "Stop Breathing" achieves a synthesis of form and content unprecedented in the artist's catalog.6
(b.)
Save for a few notable exceptions ("Teen X", "New N3on", "Place"), Carti eschews the vaunted baby voice on Whole Lotta Red, preferring to dwell on the other side of the pitch spectrum. The production is busier, and so is Carti, who switches up his trademark roomy flow in order to say more. While the album generally channels a darker, more aggressive sound than Carti's previous projects—especially his debut, celebrated for its warm, pastel tones—its abundance of tracks and extended runtime allow it to encompass a gamut of tones and moods; structures and concepts vary significantly too. Thus it is best to consider the record in terms of its many formal and thematic motifs.
Brevity:
Across the board, the tracks on WLR are pretty short. Only one song runs over four minutes. But there's a collection of particularly brief songs, less than two minutes apiece, which share a similar structure and raison d'etre. They are each the manifestation of a specific idea or feeling, embodied in the repetition of a refrain. They are typically rageful. The most extreme version of this is the first to appear: "JumpOutTheHouse". This song is repetitive even by Carti standards; the titular phrase is repeated thirty times. Not much is said beyond it. "No Sl33p", with synths that sound lifted from an Atari game, is also mostly hook: when I go to sleep I dream 'bout murder. Paranoid and brief. "New Tank" immediately follows, the best of the bunch. Rather than repeat a hook ad nauseam, Carti builds the track around an extended verse, bookended by a short refrain. Carti rides the blistering F1LTHY beat, oscillating between growl and squeal: Lamborghini parked outside, it's purple like lean. It is songs such as this where the punk allusions make the most sense,7 as Carti performs his vocals in a strange median between rapping, singing, and yelling, sounding more Johnny Rotten than Rakim. Less memorably, "Meh" and "On That Time" round out the songs that revel in brevity, each a packet of rage, more functional than interesting.
Features:
There are three vocal features on Whole Lotta Red. Track two, "Go2DaMoon", features a verse from Kanye West, who executive produced the album. (No one knows exactly what this means, but it's fair to assume Ye did little more than give Carti a verse, host him at his ranch in the weeks leading up to the album's release, and offer some general artistic direction. A co-sign goes a long way in the public imagination, or so they think.) The song, one of the album's weakest, sounds like two half-baked ideas slotted together: a typically silly latter-day Kanye verse followed by a short segment from Carti. Wheezy goes a long way to save the track, providing a gorgeous instrumental pieced around a haunting string sample. "M3tamorphosis", at five-plus minutes, is the album's only track that really lingers, as Carti lends Kid Cudi the space to croon, caw, and deliver a poor and out of place verse in the song's second half. Carti doesn't disappoint though; rapping in frenetic wheezes, he relays feelings of both divinity and alienation—they can't understand me I'm talkin' hieroglyphics—and embodies the transcendence therein, a transformation which culminates in his enigmatic repetition of the word metamorphosis, somehow stressing every syllable until the word itself becomes disassociated and alienated. In turn, Carti foretells and preemptively negates the initial reception to the project, which would be hampered by the incomprehension he predicts. Future shows up for a verse on "Teen X", the album's most purely pleasureful moment, as both rappers find themselves in their comfort zone: rapping about drugs. We on X, we on codeine. The baby voice is in full effect, and Future mimics, flexing his status as one of the few vocalists with the range to match Carti's helium flow to any degree of success. But it doesn't hit the same, as Future is at his best when he sticks closer to his naturally graveled baritone. Unlike on Self-Titled and Die Lit, which each contained verses from consistent collaborators and coevals, Carti reserves the three features on WLR for icons of the genre. While Future, a generation straddler, is the only one who arguably enriches the track he's on, the guests are largely demonstrative of the style and sensibilities of a prior generation of hip-hop artists, serving as effective counterpoints from which the listener can juxtapose Carti's performance.8
Pi'erre:
Though he worked on two of the album's tracks, Whole Lotta Red is more notable for the absence of Pi'erre Bourne than his presence. Bourne produced over half the total songs on Carti's two previous projects, including his biggest solo hit "Magnolia", playing an indispensable role in shaping what would be considered Carti's signature sound. Their chemistry was renowned, as Pierre's distinctive, melody-driven style provided foundations engaging and varied enough for Carti to rap in peak form, playing within the spaces offered by the beat rather than dominating it. While it's natural that changes in production would accompany larger shifts for Carti on WLR, the tracks Pi'erre did produce are interesting, in part because they act as another opportunity for juxtaposition to the majority of the album. "Place" is unmistakably a return to a prior mode for Carti as he takes a more passive role in the song's construction, rapping in curt, relaxed banalities that allow his charisma and spatial dexterity to do the heavy lifting. "ILoveUIHateU" features a quintessentially infectious Pi'erre beat, while Carti laments ambivalently about his drug use in putto-voiced mumbles: I mix all of my problems and prometh until I roll on my deathbed. Both tracks—plus the Maaly Raw-produced "New N3on", already a classic among Carti fans by the time the album dropped—provide a contrast in energy to the core of WLR, a short reprieve for those who hoped for more stagnation from Carti.9
Vamp:
As teased in the album's rollout and cover, a thematic thread that runs through Whole Lotta Red is Carti's newfound fascination and identification with the figure of the vampire. Two tracks explore the character explicitly, as Carti delineates his version of the archetype and incorporates it into his identity, imagining himself as the leader of a gang of "vamps". "Vamp Anthem" references the vampiric primarily through its beat, which samples the instantly recognizable Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Bach's piece of organ music used to cliché in phantom flicks. Though the sample lends a certain memeability to the track, the thin production leaves Carti little to work with, as he describes the terror and exploits of his crew but fails to extend the vamp metaphor beyond label. However, on "King Vamp", these ills are corrected courtesy of Art Dealer, Outtatown, and Star Boy, whose collaborative work provides some of the record's best beats. Over an array of rousing synths, Carti reaches into every nook of his vocal register to shape, and then become, K-I-N-G V-A-M-P. I'm a dark knight bitch, yeah I can't sleep / I fly in the sky, I got wings on my feet / when the sun goes down, yeah it's time to creep. The track's ad-libs are impeccably dense, allowing new layers to be revealed on each listen. In teasing out the vamp as character through lyrics and imagery, Carti charts another pathway—aligned yet distinct from the personal—to the particular, deepening the synthesis of form and content on WLR.
Autobiography:
Elsewhere, Carti continues to delve into the personal through the kind of specificity in name and place first revealed on "Stop Breathing". While that track used the particular in order to craft a vengeful, pulpy narrative, others further in the album are more self-reflective. On "Punk Monk", after amusingly ruminating on the tightness of his circle and the irreverence he feels for those outside it, Carti bemoans certain missed opportunities and label debacles in his career, like his failure to sign once-burgeoning rappers Trippie Redd and Lil Keed. He then reflects on salad days spent following around local Atlanta scene stalwarts KEY! and ManMan Savage before success brought backstabbing and disputes among friends. The second half of this verse imparts the extreme solitude and self-reliance wrought by all these experiences (I just worry 'bout me), culminating in a track that is both nostalgic reflection and bitter disclosure, charting Carti's evolution into a "punk monk". But it's on the opening lines of "Die4Guy", another standout produced by the trio of Art Dealer, Outtatown, and Star Boy, where Carti gets truly autobiographical. Fifteen, outside, baby I was acting like a damn thug / I wanted to be just like my brother, he was selling drugs / I wanted to be just like my brother, he a damn thug / Reggie Carter, Reggie, that's my brother / Jordan Carter, Carti, I'm your brother. With a vocal performance on par with the album's best, Carti breaks character to namecheck and divulge the influence of his blood brother on his life and aspirations. The track's lone verse begins with paranoia (I can't do no Instagram no more / all the opps lookin' for me) followed by reassurance (my brother say "Carti what you tweaking for?" / you got a whole army 'round you), as Carti proceeds to detail the extremities of his lifestyle while reminding himself of death's proximity. The hook portends sacrifice: I'm gon' die about my guys / I'm gon' die about my brother. Carti delivers his bars in a rasp that oscillates between elegiac warble and exhausted whine, conveying supreme emotional intensity throughout, from will to resignation. "Die4Guy" is distinguished for containing many of Whole Lotta Red's most alluring qualities.
Love:
While F1LTHY receives due credit for his influence on WLR's sonic palette, another figure dominates the production on the record's superior B-side. Art Dealer, Playboi Carti's longstanding creative director, worked on six of the album's last eleven tracks, including many of the project's best. While the mysterious éminence grise, nabbed by Carti after directing the video for the viral Korean trap hit "It G Ma" in 2015, had produced only one released song prior—the Die Lit opener and fan favorite "Long Time"—his beats on Whole Lotta Red exhibit a distinct and polished sound that brings Carti into further uncharted territory. On "Control", another Art Dealer, Outtatown, and Star Boy co-production, a reverberating, progressive synth leads a dense layer of beatific melodies, laying a glistening foundation on which Carti goes full-on idol mode, relaying a story of blinding infatuation through lyrics that are both narratively consistent and engagingly meandering. With a barrage of ahhs and oohs, Carti takes the opportunity to demonstrate his vocal prowess, singing in highly enunciated, emotively complex croons that elude simple typification (i.e. "baby voice") and evoke the loss of control described. "Control" begins a narrative arc that consummates on "Over", produced by Art Dealer alone. Over a spacey, driving synth, Carti returns to a more relaxed approach, detailing a crumbling relationship in one largely structureless verse that retains the looseness of a freestyle. But Carti's tone remains focused, sounding at turns disappointed and annoyed that this love don't feel how it felt when we started. While he inevitably steers the narrative towards his own lifestyle and its intractability, Carti issues a passionate, honest plea towards verse's end, his annunciation slowing down to express intensity: how the fuck we got to where we started? / your love don't feel the same like when we started. Coming after "Control", the pair tell the story of love's grasp and its entropy. "F33l Lik3 Dyin", the final track on Whole Lotta Red, reflects on the inseparability of the sweeping themes that surface toward album's end: love and death. And I feel like dyin', if you not mine. The song's instrumental borrows heavily from Bon Iver's "iMi", with Justin Vernon's sampled voice appearing throughout the track—evoking Kanye, as Carti channels and refigures Ye's precedent in stepping out of the bounds placed on hip-hop music—while its title and tone reference the Lil Wayne cult classic "I Feel Like Dying". The track is emotionally complicated, even contradictory: Carti is in love, Carti celebrates, Carti reflects, Carti feels like dying, Carti knows he's dying. No narrative, just assemblage. But it's all there.