On Whole Lotta Red’s highlights Carti expresses a vitriolic rage unheard on Die Lit. “Go2DaMoon” brandishes the rare Kanye West verse where Yeezy shows up to the booth and implements every staple from groan-inducing puns to the prolonged bars to turn in his best showing in years. Carti’s rage is directed towards gang members who murdered Carti’s close friend Bigg Sosa, so when he screams, “ Ever since my brother died/ I’ve been thinking about homicide,” we know his bloodlust isn’t put on. Carti pounces from syrupy repetitions to breathless refrains but this is a warm up for the unhinged “Stop Breathing.” With hoarse, angry yawps that melt into autotuned falsettos, he sounds like he’s shouting threats in a crowded club. The meaty bass and blown out distortion of “Rockstar Made” belies Carti’s new killer instinct.
In the opening trifecta of songs Carti displays more agility and intentionality than he has across his entire discography. Whole Lotta Red is a balancing act wherein no one is sure what direction Carti will take. He’ll contort the cadence, the pitch, the tone, the pronunciation, anything but the refrain itself. Carti becomes the rhythm, his voice another layer in the confrontational soundscapes. Around him everything dissolves into a thrash of squawks and hollers and burbles and yelps and occasionally a bar that reminds that Carti is in fact a human being. He’s finally the highlight of his own show more exciting than a AAA executive producer, more interesting than any elusive leaks, more commanding than any engulfing production and more engrossing a performer. Instead, he rose like Dracula from the crypt, with a fixation on violence and a slew of vocal capabilities that render his previous output fecund. This should’ve been the blow that careened Carti out of Candyland with the bitter aftertaste of aspartame. That’s enough content for the next two decades–or three albums, if you sequence like he does. On the other hand, almost 100 of Carti’s tracks leaked, many of which now appear on Whole Lotta Red and further his cloudy, euphoric brand along with his patented baby voice, a high pitch drool of a vocal timbre. Over the past two years Carti has only officially released one single, the non-album glossed into a few guest slots and left trails of tweets consisting of butt-dialed emojis. Cloud rap stripped of its murkiness and fried into a chocolate bar. Die Lit was as much a certification of Carti’s rap canon nihilism as it was Pi’erre’s unmistakable production. Carti’s droopy delivery paired with Pi’erre Bourne’s kaleidoscopic beats transposed to a realm orbiting pure pleasure and haze. It’s only been two years since the firestorm release of Die Lit, which felt akin to bathing in bubbling Stevia.
How else would one explain the disregard for what constitutes lyrics, or how to structure a song, or what a chorus is supposed to be, or Carti’s pivot away from the leaked tracks that have been the succulent nectar in the IV of his fans since Die Lit? Here, Carti comes into his own by stepping into the coffin of a vampire, scoffing at every critique tossed towards his vaudeville fangs. Playboy Carti’s Whole Lotta Red ruthlessly postulates a third option to the binary of style versus substance: the style being the substance.