By Robert Moran
Playboi Carti, Music
On Mojo Jojo, the fifth track on Playboi Carti’s Music, there’s Kendrick Lamar – hip-hop’s reigning global heavy-hitter – doing awkward adlibs like he’s just another background member of Carti’s entourage; it’s his first of three appearances on the album. In 2025, the year of his Grammys coronation and chart success, even Kendrick knows there’s cross-generational clout in bagging a Carti feature.
By just his third album, Playboi Carti (real name Jordan Carter) has become rap’s crown prince, an era-defining superstar. On Spotify this week, Music became the most-streamed album in a single day in 2025 so far, surpassing recent releases from The Weeknd and Lady Gaga. In the US, Carti’s projected to become one of only three artists ever – behind Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen – to chart 30 songs from a single project on the Billboard Hot 100. In Australia, Music just debuted at No.1 on the ARIA albums chart this week, highlighting his global reach.
Enigmatic and inscrutable: Playboi Carti at Rolling Loud Festival in Los Angeles this week.Credit: Getty Images
Carti’s journey began on his 2017 self-titled mixtape, buoyed by the blown-out luxury of producer Pi’erre Bourne’s beats on Magnolia and Wokeuplikethis, but exploded with 2020’s Whole Lotta Red, a “rage-rap” touchstone that spawned followers like Yeat, Trippie Redd, 2Hollis, Nettspend and Carti’s own Opium label descendants Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely, and was labelled among the greatest hip-hop albums of all-time by Rolling Stone and the second-best album of the 2020s so far (behind only Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters) by Pitchfork.
That he’s achieved it with an inscrutability that’s rarely seen in modern music is even more intriguing. Music arrived with a half-decade of anticipation, and as many release dates promised and missed (the title on the album cover is a relic from that period, shortened last minute).
In that time, Carti also earned a reputation for cancelling gigs on a whim, like a star who knows he doesn’t need it (“I just cancelled one of my shows to watch me a film,” he nonchalantly boasts on Fine Shit, one of several Music tracks co-produced by Melbourne’s own Keanu Beats). A social media agnostic, his veil inspired endless memes and myths across Reddit (one early theory posited he was the reincarnated soul of Tupac Shakur; Carti was born on September 13, 1996, the same day ’Pac died. Or a year earlier. No one quite knows).
There’s also been controversy. In February 2023, he was accused of choking his girlfriend who was 14 weeks pregnant. His former partner, Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, has repeatedly suggested he’s an absent father to their son. It makes the amorous boasting on some songs, like the otherwise alluring OPM Babi, feel at best obnoxious, at worst dire. Over the horrorcore dirge HBA, he sounds deranged as he raps casual throwaways like “all of my friends are dead”.
None of it has dented Carti’s popularity. More recently, he’s had an uptick of chart moments, highlighting the playing field he’s been inducted to, including Popular with The Weeknd and Madonna, and his outlandish verse on Camila Cabello’s bonkers I Luv It, where his garbled flow turns gibberish (it’ll go down as one of ’20s-pop’s great experiments). This week, he earned the ALL CAPS ire of former collaborator Kanye (Ye has one credit on Music but expected more), always an indicator of zeitgeisty reach.
The focus, though, has remained on Carti’s post-language drawl, the logical evolution of the slurry mumble-rap of his Atlanta forebears Future and Young Thug, both of whom make cameos on Music (a tip of the hat even the disgruntled “rap music these days” set can understand). If the rambling nothings of mumblecore represented Millennial disaffection, Carti’s nihilist yelp is the shrug at the end of the world.
Playboi Carti’s Music: a juggernaut in more ways than one.
On Music, it’s at its most gloriously unbridled on Olympian and HBA and Like Weezy, where he tumbles over his own noises like no one else. Elsewhere, he showcases his versatility – a gritty growl atop the industrial grind of Cocaine Noise; a nitrous garble on KPop; a whispery rasp over the booming Radar. On highlight I Seeeeee You Baby Boi, he’s yearning and paranoid over a whirling EDM-ish blast. On the fantastic Crank, over a beat like bed springs, he’s at his eccentric best, a man of many voices.
Music, then, plays like an introductory boast to a wider audience, as much as a culmination. From opening track Pop Off – with its bassline burbling like a flatlining android, and Carti’s vocals squelched to the point of constriction – the album flickers across all his styles, from the billowing romance of early Carti (Rather Lie, with The Weeknd) to the distorted crunch that first got a generation of rap kids wearing all black, stage diving and slam dancing (Cocaine Nose).
It should be exhausting, and at times it is (three Travis Scott features is three too many), but there’s a tossed-off energy to the project that’s appealing, turning what could’ve been a “serious statement” into an unpretentious hodgepodge that’s unified by its free-for-all disunity (those incessant Swamp Izzo hype-man interjections, surprisingly, help). After such expectation, the reaction was always going to be mixed – but judging from its instant impact, he’s earned his mantle.
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