Despite a sea of ifs, buts, and maybes, Playboi Carti silenced his own industry antics, with the release of the highly anticipated ‘Whole Lotta Red’. With a sort of elusive-lore of its very own, the album was inevitably going to be fighting an uphill battle to win over skeptics and fans alike, but, ‘Whole Lotta Red’ never once tries to top the Carti discography, but rather lives in its shadow. Suffering from a near-identical set of issues to Carti’s widely professed magnum opus, ‘Die Lit’, multiplied tenfold, what should’ve been Carti striking whilst the world was eating out of the palm of his hand, is instead a moment of delusion and overambition. ‘Whole Lotta Red’ is an almost catastrophic failure that I feel the need to applaud given just how spectacularly it burns out.
It’s not as if this disappointment was entirely out of the blue. Though ultimately scrapped, the then lead single ‘@ MEH’, in retrospect was a sign of things to come. Sure, it’s not on the album, but that hasn’t stopped it from being in any way indicative of the quality of ‘Whole Lotta Red’. We have the similarly titled ‘Meh’ that proves that Carti desperately needs to learn a thing or two about quality control. With everything dialed to one hundred, there’s no texture or contrast, but instead, a hideously overblown piece of trap that captures all the least refined elements of Carti’s brand.
Running for an hour and change, and spanning a monstrous 24 tracks, it’s as if Carti feels a certain oath to make up for lost time. But by hitting us in the face in one go, he ends up doing more harm than good. It’s inclusions like the directionless, ‘Over’ that expose just how carelessly curated the album is. If it were marketed as a posthumous cut, given just how vapid and amateurishly constructed it is, I wouldn’t bat an eye. Carti does himself no favours by jampacking the album with bottom of the barrel filler like ‘Place’ and ‘New N3on’, which has the crooner sounding more deflated and less interested in his own craft than ever before. The only redeeming feature is just how pathetically short both cuts are. It’s a series of low points on an album that punches below its weight.
‘Whole Lotta Red’ isn’t simply a case of common denominators and half-assed attempts, as the record houses some of the ugliest vocals to grace a record in 2020. The crooner stoops to new levels of hideousness on ‘Die4Guy’. It’s a shame that the track’s respectable sentiment of brotherly love and admiration is left to rot beneath whatever Frankenstein vocal acrobatics Carti conjures up. Here, he sounds as if he were having the life squeezed out of him, with each breath possibly being his last. As eccentric and cutting edge as Carti has historically been, on ‘JumpOutTheHouse’ he tears a page out of the book of the Lil Keed’s and Lil Baby’s of the world with an anything but subtle homage to Young Thug. Granted, he’s a lot more flexible vocally than the former, but if it isn’t the dollar store imitation that’s a turn-off, it’ll be his nauseating repetition of the title.
Admittedly, I didn’t head into ‘Whole Lotta Red’ expecting poetic lyricism, but when Carti isn’t gunning for the top spot of hip-hop’s least inventive wordsmith with his tedious hooks, he’s awkwardly navigating his way around insincere love ballads. In the curious case of ‘Control’, he does both. I’d like to believe the track comes from a heartfelt place, but with the demeanor of a child on a sugar rush, and the particularly unflattering “Bitch, I’m not a stalker (Oh, slatt)/But baby, I always watch you (What? Ooh)” line, Carti’s anthem of undivided infatuation lacks anything remotely endearing. Carti pulls a bit of a 180 on ‘ILoveUIHateU’, where he is infinitely more vulnerable – crooning about commitment and asking for the same dedication in return – only this time, it’s an issue of Carti sounding vocally uninvested.
Carti’s contemporaries don’t fare a whole lot better than the trap innovator in their efforts to salvage the album. Whilst Carti has made his niche brand of baby vocals a calling card of sorts, he oversteps a few too many boundaries, in unison with Future, on drug-induced high of ‘Teen X’. Given the multi-phased synth passages, you’d think the track would be this recipe for success to the seasoned psychedelic performers. In tandem, the two are balls to the wall hellbent on rinsing their animated vocals for what they’re worth, as ‘Teen X’ gets lodged between the ears for all the wrong reasons.
Where ‘Teen X’ boasts exciting production choices at the very least, ‘Go2DaMoon’ doesn’t even have that privilege. What’s most perplexing, is the fact that it’s presented as a PlayBoi Carti song, despite ‘Go2DaMoon’ being yet another installment of Ye’s offbeat tangents. These ramblings of a mad man, shopping list-type vent-fests, appear to be the new norm for West, and between his hollow braggadocio and reference to his political campaign, the track is dominated by his own ego-stroking rant. Carti himself might as well not be credited, as his 20-second appearance fails to leave a mark on the track, and essentially feels like an incoherent 2 for 1.
Somewhere in the midst of all these failed experiments and deja-vu inducing inclusions are tracks that are far more reminiscent of Carti’s tried and tested blueprint. Carti whittles track’s like ‘Beno!’ down to their bare essentials, until he basically epitomises the sound that captured ears the world over. Between its zany, minimalist synth production, and a contagious performance that has Carti bouncing off of the walls, it’s one of the most well-rounded and easily digestible tracks on the LP. Delving into some of Carti’s bolder and more eccentric undertakings, ‘No Sl33p’ is a short and anything but sweet highlight. With its flickering disarray of glitchy synths and a performance from Carti that’ll feel like he’s breathing down your neck, I’m left feeling claustrophobic with how constricting and ghoulish it is.
When Carti strikes gold, a moment beyond few and far between on ‘Whole Lotta Red’, it really feels as if he overachieves. In unison with Kid Cudi, ‘M3tamorphosis’ see’s the pair enter this monstrous rampage as they gloss over ideas of change and evolution. With all its spine-tingling humming, graveling synths, and earth-shattering bass it’s all very surreal. Carti and Cudi only up the ante with their wild and blackhearted performances respectively. It’s easily one of the most distinct and experimental successes on the record. Though not nearly as nuanced, the maniacal ‘King Vamp’ has Carti feeling as infectious and deranged as ever. With its hair-raising synths that hit like stab wounds and a spine chilling vocal performance, it’s an unparalleled haunted-house type of kooky nightmare.
That’s not to say that outside of the odd highlight there aren’t redeemable aspects hidden throughout the album’s less than forgiving run time. ‘Whole Lotta Red’ houses numerous instrumentals that are above and beyond what the rest of the mainstream trap albums of 2020 had to offer. Whether it’s that bizarre mix of intergalactic synths and industrial bass on the album’s opener ‘Rockstar Made’, the mean demeanour of the guitars on the rough, yet compact ‘Die4Guy’, or the brooding exuberance of ‘Stop Breathing’, it’s a glimpse into that same viral and infectious dynamic that made ‘Die Lit’ such a unique and engaging experience. Carti’s failure to co-exist with his production speaks volumes as to how amateurishly crafted ‘Whole Lotta Red’ is. In some cases, it’s as if Carti’s goal was to sabotage the record in any way possible, and if that was the case, I have to congratulate the crooner on his contributions.
‘Whole Lotta Red’ is anything but the logical successor to ‘Die Lit’, and is instead a moment of regression. The record falls short in its attempts to recapture Carti’s fun eccentricity, and is instead more of an arduous chore to sit through, than any Carti album before it. More than anything, the record serves as proof as to why Carti’s particular brand of trap isn’t more commonly replicated. Somewhere along the lines, he pushes the limit of his niche quirks into more avant-garde manifestations, as Carti’s quirkiness gets to his head and becomes a detriment to the record. ‘Whole Lotta Red’ stretches well beyond its use-by-date and runs its course twice over. The Playboi Carti gimmick proves to be functional for only so long, despite the album lasting for what feels like an eternity.
Whole Lotta Red – Playboi Carti – 3/10
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