Playboi Carti -- Whole Lotta Red: Review

Playboi Carti -- Whole Lotta Red

[Interscope]

Playboi Carti’s long-awaited Whole Lotta Red is one of the most anticipated albums of 2020. For almost a year and a half, the hip-hop community has been expecting this album to drop despite numerous delays to its release. Whole Lotta Red has been delayed so many times that the community has become desensitized and even made memes joking that it would never come out at all. The rapper has been teasing it between his sparse, cryptic social media posts to the several rumors about the record that, despite bringing both positive AND negative attention, brought him attention nonetheless.

It all started in 2017, off the back of Carti’s debut self-titled mixtape Playboi Carti that intrigued the music scene for its unique take on late-stage trap music. Carti and his resident producer Pierre Bourne created a sound of trap music that was so psychedelic, inventive, and danceable it took Gen Z by storm. By mixing Carti’s wild baby vocals as a working element of the music’s timbre, each track played more as a carnival of trap psychedelia than a run-of-the-mill trap song.

Every song on the self-titled mixtape is engineered to sound like a face-melting smoothie of catchy rhythms and melodies, and Carti’s breakout track “Magnolia” was a masterclass in this very style. On his acclaimed 2018 debut studio record Die Lit, Carti dived deeper down the rabbit hole of this sound, fully committing to his colorful and unique sound.

With features from rap heavyweights like Travis Scott and Young Thug on Die Lit and even two appearances from Lil Uzi Vert from the debut mixtape, it was expected that Whole Lotta Red would be another project of stacked production credits and features. Not only that, but the hyper-psychedelic trap vibe of his music was expected to continue here too. With an artist like Playboi Carti, expectations can’t help but be through the roof.

I’ve tried my best to keep my expectations in check and not let it cloud my perception. Then again, with no tracklist released until the release and one non-album single made to build hype, nobody really knew where Carti was going with this new one. So when Whole Lotta Red dropped, nobody really expected the kind of direction Carti would go in. But really, Carti doesn’t have any distinct direction with the album and whatever semblance of one there is, it sure as hell isn’t well executed.

Whole Lotta Red is a husk of Carti’s signature style, tossing out so many of his trademark features that made him so popular in the first place and falling into a pit of lackluster production. Unlike his first two records, producer Pierre Bourne is almost nowhere to be seen on his biggest album yet. While Bourne produced literally more than 75% percent of Die Lit, he contributes two tracks to Whole Lotta Red’s hefty 24 tracklist--”Place” and “ILoveuUIHateU”--both of which barely reach the same quality of Bourne’s normal work, struggling under unorganized structure and one-dimensional melodies.

Meanwhile, the rest of Whole Lotta Red features production from all over the place, including F1lthy, Art Dealer, and Outtatown, all of which do their best Pierre Bourne impression to no avail. The mixing on these tracks just feel so much more awkward than Carti’s earlier music. The beats run too bland to clean up around Carti’s bab-iest vocals, which by the way, the mix does no favors making it so loud.

Now, to give them some credit, I think Carti’s vocals are at their most cold-blooded on Whole Lotta Red, especially like “Stop Breathing” and “Vamp Anthem”, the latter of which best embodies his recent vampire phase within his social media and whatnot. “On That Time” contains Carti’s unabridged fury in his delivery, reminiscent of his colder hits on the debut tape.

However, his vocals are double-edged and more often than not, experiments in vocals don’t go over very well. The drawn-out and jaded “Rockstar Made” features some of the cringiest vocals on the records where Carti reaches too far out of his register to make that anything sound remotely good. “JumpOutTheHouse” has Carti spitting fast and hard but the repetitive, poor delivery on the chorus and the messy verses are unpleasant at best and just a fuckin’ mess at worst.

And in the slumps of the album (which is most of it), tracks blend together in vocals and production, and not in a cool psychedelic way. Songs like “King Vamp” and “Sky” and “New Tank” and “Meh” and “Die4Guy” lack any memorable substance to make them stand out from the other and all of them combine to sound like a bunch of low quality demos. Carti’s unrefined vocals pop up on almost every track in the hour-long tracklist and make so many songs here automatic skips.

I guess we can talk about the sparse features on here starting with “Go2DaMoon” which features Kanye West but is really just sounds like a Pablo-era Kanye B-side with a Carti feature since he doesn’t show up on a verse until the last 30 fuckin seconds of the song! The song ends mid Carti-verse like he got cut off in the fucking bounce of the song.

“Metamorphosis” with Kid Cudi is actually a pretty good song as Cudi lends his sacred, trippy hums which fit neatly under Carti’s wild adlibs painting a multi-dimensional psychedelic banger. Carti’s lavish verse conjures up some cool imagery and Cudi’s verse is hard as hell. This one’s a favorite of mine and I’m thankful that such an interesting combination of artists wasn’t squandered.

But most of Whole Lotta Red suffers from a lack of quality and consistency, straying too far from Carti’s style into uninteresting, trap filler. This hulking record reaches just over an hour of runtime and the dip in quality of the songs definitely shows. Even after this record has been delayed so many times, it definitely sounds rushed and that quality will hinder the album’s legacy.

While I definitely did like a track here and there--my favorite is “Not PLaying”--this album’s a mess and shows a change in direction that doesn’t do Playboi Carti any favors. While the rapper might be able to pump out more rap songs then ever, most of them are made to be forgotten and will be leaving most listeners feeling ‘meh’.

2 out of 5.