Seemingly out of nowhere, Playboi Carti’s five-year music drought has finally ended.
For up to a year now, Carti has been rolling out his album with the “2024” agenda. When 2024 came and went, fans were left disappointed.
However, on Carti’s website, it stated that all preorders of the record will either go through or be refunded if they weren’t shipped by March 12. Since no refunds were received, fans immediately thought the album would be here by March 14, that Friday. With that, everyone was right. The record finally landed on streaming services on Friday around 8 a.m. EST.
I am going to preface this section with the fact that Carti is typically not known for his amazing flow or great lyricism because there is none if I’m being so honest. Where Carti lacks in these departments, he’s great at creating a “vibe” throughout each and every one of his tracks with whatever vocal performance he comes up with.
I will admit, there aren’t any standout songs that come to mind when I think of Carti’s vocal performance though. This is because he’s most of the time carried by the production of a track or just making sure to be hype whenever the song allows it.
This doesn’t mean he’s instantly a terrible artist though. There are artists out there that are the complete opposite. In my mind, present-day Eminem falls into this category. Sure, he can rap his butt off. However, I think his music is awful because he only cares about how great he can rap, as opposed to a song actually sounding good. With that, while there are quite a few songs that aren’t all that great vocal-wise, the Carti was at least decent enough to warrant listening to the album multiple times.
As for the features, we only have mainstream names. Names like Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar, Young Thug and Lil Uzi Vert are plastered all over the feature list. Instead of talking about how they each did individually, I’d like to touch on how necessary each of them really were.
As for Travis Scott’s four features, only one was really needed. I think that his performance on “CRUSH” was decent, but that’s about it. Same goes with Uzi who had two features with only one being liked by me. People are very conflicted with Kendrick’s features since they also think they were mostly unneeded.
My point is that while features can definitely help out an album and its replayability, if they’re used as a crutch or not used nearly enough, then the record can start to sound bland. In this case, every other track has an unwanted feature and it just makes the tracks even longer than they already are.
There are some great standouts though, like The Weeknd, and his precious vocals, and Uzi’s feature that I did end up liking off of “TWIN TRIM.” On this track, we get more of an older Uzi style and I am in love with the song.
Because of the over abundance of features, I can’t help but to think the features as a whole were “meh.”
As for the best part of the record, we have the production. Some of my favorite tracks production-wise have to be the intro song, “POP OUT,” “CRANK,” “GOOD CREDIT” and “COCAINE NOSE.” All of which offer that “rock rap” soundscape that I fell in love with while listening to JPEGMAFIA’s most recent project. Each of them also pair with Carti’s efforts in making a song hype as can be to make up for his under average performances.
As a whole, I’ve read up on the fact that Ye produced a lot of the tracklist, which makes sense. Ever since the two first collaborated on Carti’s “Whole Lotta Red,” the two have been working with each other creating great tracks like Ye’s 2021 track “Off the Grid” and now production-wise for some of the songs here.
My favorite song, performance and production-wise is easily “COCAINE NOSE.” The producer behind this track is F1LTHY, who grew famous from his work with various artists like Carti, such as Ken Carson, Yeat, LUCKI and even artists like Bladee.
With that being said, I’m truly in love with some bouts of production here. Making the production my favorite part of the record, easily.
Finally, I think this album is anything but replayable. I will admit, I love a few tracks here and there, but to have 30 different songs and only a few of them are liked, there’s an issue.
Sure, we as fans have waited for five years for the project, but we waited the same time for Travis Scott’s “UTOPIA” and that record only had 19 tracks. It’s even more of an issue when a few of the tracks start to blend in with each other with this kind of production style. Building off of the long tracklist, the record is also a long hour and 16 minutes.
For an album listening experience, this album is mediocre. If you want to pick out a few songs here and there to listen to, by all means go ahead. In that regard, the album is then passable. With that being said, it should be obvious to you that the replayability is bad.
At long last, the album has been picked apart from different categories, such as Carti’s decent performance on each track, the lackluster features, the great production, and the awful replayability of the record.
With all of that in mind, Playboi Carti’s “MUSIC” gets a 5 out of 10.