Whole Lotta Red is a whole lotta trash.
Of all the modern hip hop artists that are labelled as
‘mumble rappers’, Playboi Carti is probably the most deserving. He’s taken the
garbled warbling of Young Thug and pushed it to new levels of
unintelligibility. Some of the comments on his YouTube videos are absolutely
hilarious:
Carti’s debut album Die Lit was very popular, but I
personally wasn’t a fan. While I admit that the beats went HARD, the vocals did
nothing for me. Not only were the lyrics indecipherable, but there was no
energy poured into any of it (although the psychedelic layering did give it ‘a
vibe’).
Whole Lotta Red sees Carti taking the vocal contortionism
up a notch. In fact, it makes Die Lit look like an elocution lesson. The
album opens with Carti blurting the line ‘NEVER TOO MUCH, NEVER TOO MUCH, NEVER TOO MUCH…’ repeatedly at the listener like a scratched Luther
Vandross CD, before devolving into rasped gibberish. This pretty much sets the
tone for the album – lots of rasped gibberish with the occasional line repeated
over and over again.
In the beginning, I found it all to be quite comical. In
fact, I couldn’t help but chuckle when Carti began mangling his voice to Taz-the-Tasmanian-Devil
extremes on ‘JumpOutTheHouse’. On the fifth track ‘M3tamorphosis’, the ironically discernible line ‘they
can’t understand me, I’m talking hieroglyphics’ made me wonder if it was
all supposed to be a joke. Perhaps Playboi Carti’s vocals weren’t terrible
after all? Perhaps he was a misunderstood genius? At this point, guest Kid Cudi
showed up and shook me back to reality – after five tracks of auto-tuned
toddler noises, I’d forgotten the joy of hearing a vocalist that’s actually in
key and on beat. And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t usually care for
Cudi.
Once the vocals stopped being funny and started being
annoying, I found the remainder of the 24 tracks to be pretty horrible. Carti’s
vocals may be creatively goofy, but they’re not for me. It was like listening
to Jar Jar Binks having a stroke for an hour. And then there’s the incessant
repetition, which quite frankly puts even Lil Uzi Vert to shame – instead of writing
pleasantly catchy hooks, he just hammers the same bar into the listener’s head
a hundred times: 'NEVER TOO MUCH, NEVER TOO MUCH, NEVER TOO MUCH...'
Most shocking of all was the beats. After the amazing
production on Die Lit, I at least hoped there would be some good beats
to distract from the vocals. However, most of these beats are surprisingly flat.
Even lead single ‘Meh’ – which has a good beat – has been left off the album
and replaced with a mundane imposter version.
I don’t expect Carti to quit the goofy vocals and start
rapping poetry. However, I do think he can give more than this. It would be
nice for him to stop endlessly repeating lines and craft actual songs. Decent production wouldn’t do a miss either.
★☆☆☆☆
TRACK TASTER: