Playboi Carti is our Miles Davis.

Whole Lotta Red vs. Kind of Blue. John Coltrane vs. Cannonball Adderley. Snippet as reality. Stream as post-mortem. Vamps and endless vamping. What to do when artists let you down.

Before I jump in: Thank you for subscribing. I’m so grateful so many of you read and liked and shared my first issue.

If you don’t mind, I could use your help figuring out the shape and cadence of this newsletter. This second issue is a good example. Today I want to tell you why I think Playboi Carti is the most fascinating commercial pop artist of the last five years. I want to share some thoughts I’ve had about him and his output, and with some luck convince you to reassess or take a listen for the first time.

But I don’t know what you know and what you don’t know. I don’t know how much backstory you want or need on, say, the last decade of Atlanta hip-hop, or the nuances of how artists present themselves on social media, or the semiotics of digital distribution and leak culture, or all the post-Hebdige versions of how subcultures can work and develop. You also might want all of this, but that doesn’t mean you can read all of it in the time you allot to reading friend’s (or strangers’) online newsletters.

So if you can, please leave a comment or send me a note on IG and tell me how I can make this a newsletter you’re excited to see in your inbox, and not one you slowly but surely begin to dread like another box of misshapen vegetables or a late-night Duolingo notification.

Up until a few years ago, rap music from Atlanta (“trap”) had become a kind of crib sheet for the sound of popular commercial music in general: hard, clipped drums, dollops of pitched 808 bass, hooks made of tiny little Autotuned hooklets, punchy ad libs that lit up reverb sends like fireworks, monophonic, pseudo-counterpoint piano and keyboard leads, slower tempos with double-time rhythmic vocal cadences, predominantly minor and Phrygian harmonic structures that felt exotic and beautiful but still allowed for traditional singing. I experienced this on the production side, and the formula seemed inescapable until 2019 when major artists like The Weeknd (“Blinding Lights”) and Post Malone (“Sunflowers”, “Circles”) seemed to break out of the feedback loop and made it okay for other artists to try new styles too.

Playboi Carti seemed next up for a crossover hit around then. Die Lit, his album from 2018, already signaled those aspirations, with big-name features from proven radio stars (Nikki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Travis Scott), a cult internet hit with Lil Uzi Vert (“Shoota”), and of course the original fashionista co-sign of A$AP Rocky. The formula of Carti’s flow in this era was simple, repetitive, and very smartdumb. Reminded me of Young Jeezy ten years earlier: What if the ad libs were the song?

After years of delay, we got Carti’s follow-up Whole Lotta Red. It was Christmas day in 2020, the pandemic still in full swing. Like so many others, I was confounded on first listen. It reminded me of downloading the second Liars album in the Soulseek era. Was it possible the band had recorded a decoy shitty album and deliberately leaked it, so that when the real album came out everyone would be that much more psyched?

Carti is not lyrical in any traditional way, but he had never been this aggressively literal. When I go to sleep, I dream about murder. That’s it, that’s the chorus. Doesn’t even rhyme! The whimsical repetition of something like “Poke It Out” had given way to something much more aggressive if not outright cynical too: the same line said sometimes seven or eight times in a row with no stylistic switchup, no sauce, nothing. I feel like God. I feel like God. I feel like God..

It was the instrumentals that threw me the most. There was no beginning or end, no build, no climax – just relentless one-bar vamps of distorted 808, and dense latticeworks of synth leads with no clear harmonic progression, no stop and start, little call and response. Some tracks felt like Stockhausen: an unmoving wall of sound that doesn’t dictate how to listen to it, but instead invites your ears to find patterns and in essense co-create the rhythms and melodies. Other tracks felt like outright novelty records, like “Vamp Anthem”, a goof on Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor that happened to be co-produced by KP Beats, who I was renting my downstairs studio to at the time.

The album was very quickly dubbed Whole Lotta Mid. But I recognize a controlled burn when I see it. I knew immediately there would be two eras: Before Whole Lotta Red and after. To say the music was “good” or “mid” or “bad” was missing the point. Playboi Carti had a certain version of success teed up for himself. Instead he tore the whole thing down.

Wordplay and referentiality, two cornerstones of rap lyricism, were not something he seemed to cared about. A “good” mix, at least by the standards of commercial popular music at the time, was not something he seemed to care about. You don’t avoid hooks, universal concepts, contrast between sections — all the stuff you’ll hear an A&R tell you are the necessary ingredients to a hit song — you don’t NOT play the game this aggressively unless you have a bigger play in mind.

So what was the bigger play? What were the new values?

There’s nothing like a second album to make you wonder if there will ever be a demand for a third. I find it interesting that Carti embraced the vampire aesthetic: With a little bit of luck, and a whole lotta red, vampires can live forever.

It’s not the most popular song on WLR, but to me the beating heart of the whole project, and the closest we get to a statement of intent, is the song called “M3tamorphosis”:

I feel like Morpheus, I feel like Morpheus /

I got my whole gang on some other shit /

I done changed my swag /

Metamorphosis (x7)

Good is subjective, which is to say it’s temporary. The only way to stick around is to keep changing. Change is the only thing that keeps on happening. Endless vamping.

I feel like God. Because gods – or whatever higher force you believe in – are misunderstood (I’m talking hieroglyphics), make all the rules including the ones you don’t know about (Can’t nobody tell you shit), and are quick to put you in your place (Why the fuck I gotta remind you that I run this shit?).

Which brings me to Miles Davis. Countless times in Miles’s career, he faced a similar conundrum. Do I do the thing people want, that I know I can do well, that will let me buy another Lamborghini? Or do I do the thing that scares me a little bit, and that will almost definitely scare other people a lot more, that will make all the business people really angry?

When I watch the video for “M3tamorphosis'“, which features the rapper Kid Cudi, I can’t help but think of the first time I heard John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley take solos on Kind of Blue. (Kind of Blue, Whole Lotta Red — I mean, not reading into that, but as my friend Leven Kali said last week, it doesn’t hurt!)

Evans/Davis’s instrumental compositions of Kind of Blue were aggressively different from contemporary bebop’s breakneck cascade of ii-V-Is. These pieces were modal, with a key center that the soloist lived in for 16 or so bars at a time, no longer navigating chord changes like a skiier down a slalom, but inventing movement within that key center, and essentially being both the skiier and the mountain at the same time.

Coltrane’s solo in “So What” comes after Davis’s. Panned left, it starts smooth and bluesy, taking cues from Miles’s handoff, before breaking away into raw, skronky, at times deeply unmelodic seemingly unrelated couplets of sound. This is the first time we get a sense of the true promise of modal jazz, the way it will change how so many jazz musicians will play with and against one another for the next ten years. We aren’t ever just listening to the sound itself. We’re also listening to the promise of that sound.

Next and panned right, Cannonball Adderley. This is one of the greatest saxophonists giving one of the most melodically memorable solos in the history of recorded jazz! It’s charming, sometimes knowingly quaint. Again, so much more musical than Coltrane’s flights of scalar fancy. But compared to Coltrane, it just sounds old as fuck. He’s playing over these changes the way he plays over bebop changes. He struggles at the turnarounds. Even as a teenager, I always felt like something was off about this solo, especially his ins and outs of the key change. Pretend Kind of Blue was the birth of bebop; to my ears Adderley was playing Dixieland.

Cudi (in the video, panned right on the back of the Sherp tank), struck me similarly out of place on “M3tamorphosis”. Kid Cudi – legendary artist who means a lot to many people, who opened the door for a lot of young black artists to be vulnerable in their music. Like Cannonball’s, I find his verse to be super charming, super catchy. Good, in fact! But good does not mean anything in this new world of Carti’s. What matters is change – constant, haphazard. But Cudi stayed still.

I don’t believe there’s any malevolent spirit involved here. If anything I think it’s the opposite – Carti and Cudi surely both know the new/old contrast is necessary in order to make a record that’s literally called “M3tamorphosis” work.

We saw it again a few weeks ago with “Backrooms”, a new Carti song with Travis Scott. The tempo and pocket and sonic world are hard for Scott to find a foothold in with the tools he has at his disposal. He struggles. I’m sure he heard this on playback too – he’s such a talent and has incredible ears. What’s interesting to me is the decision to let it happen regardless. A willing sacrifice to the god that is change.

More change: You’ll notice that “Backrooms”, along with almost all new Playboi Carti music since the release of Whole Lotta Red, is not available on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal – traditional music streaming services. The songs have debuted on Instagram and Youtube only, soundtracking casual day-in-the-life vlog-like videos that remind me a lot of the lofi music video work my brother Anthony’s done for JPEGMAFIA the last few years. Like the music, Carti’s videos resist all forms of narrative and force you to live in the now of the footage itself.

But why no streaming? Why release a song on Instagram, which pays nada? There are so many possible reasons. But in hindsight I suspect we will wonder why it took anyone this long to recognize what Carti recognized first: Listening to music on Spotify is like buying a CD at Costco.

Context matters. It’s why studio snippets hit so hard. There’s an implied danger, and a crucial mystery: A bunch of people you don’t know in a dark studio, singing along to words you can’t make out, while the record is played so loudly on the mains it overloads their iPhone’s microphone and your iPhone’s speakers too. 10 seconds, and it’s over. The only thing that’s better than a great song is the greater one you imagine in your head.

Studio snippets live on Instagram. Engineers’ hard drives are routinely hacked and emptied onto Youtube and Soundcloud. These are the DIY venues of digital music. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Playboi Carti wants us to hear his new music in those rickety, semi-legal contexts first – divorced from the forced contexts of lifestyle playlists, algorithmic listening, and the downright corniness of big box tech. Make no mistake: Spotify is music’s final resting place. It’s where music goes to retire.

Which is to say, for the last three years, it has meant something to be a Playboi Carti fan because you have actively had to work at being a Carti fan. The show is at capacity and you’ve had to find your way in through the kitchen. He’s not doing interviews or beat breakdowns or NFT drops or AMAs in the Interscope community discord. The slightest most shadowy movements online and elsewhere are dissected like Sybilline prophecies. To acquire and leak his music, perversely, is a high form of fandom. In the absence of direction, they look to his tastes for cues, talk amongst themselves, etc. WWCD? What would Carti do? American music’s most exciting new subculture is born.

I encourage you to read the comments sections of Carti’s new videos. They’re filled with fans’ long, knowingly hyperbolic stories about the effect his music has had on them and their families: Cancers cured, sight restored, etc. Instagram accounts like Hyperpopdaily have become the Pitchfork News of the rap underground, with running storylines of Carti-adjacent and similar artists most people have never heard of. In Carti’s deliberate scarcity, communities have sprung up around two artists on his label, Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely, who make similarly blown-out rave-ups. Without officially releasing any new music in three years, Carti’s monthly listeners on Spotify have reached over 40M. He’s the #61 most listened to artist in the world, and his newest music has been off platform. Why even bother courting the mainstream? Why make music for people who don’t even like music?

Because Carti. Because change. Because he must. The problem with Playboi Carti being our Miles Davis is: He’s also our Miles Davis. For every On the Corner, there’s also an Amandla. But also, ethically, Davis was just not the best dude. And if the accusations hold true, Carti hasn’t exactly been the best dude either. My beautiful dark twisted fantasy is Carti’s creative mindset bleeds into the rest of his life and helps him find his peace, as I fundamentally refuse to believe being an egotist is some necessary flipside of being an artistic genius.

One last thing, from the promotional website for SHERP tanks:

“Obstacles do not block the path. They are the path.”

Not reading into it. But it doesn’t hurt.