I AM MUSIC, literally

To understand MUSIC you have to take its cover at face value. "I AM MUSIC" is not just some tongue-in-cheek nod to Playboi Carti's half-decade long ubiquity in commercial and underground rap circles alike, it's a literal statement of artistic intent, because on his third studio album the South Atlanta vamp seeks to do nothing less than embody the entire universe of rap music. Across 30 tracks Carti flits through all manner of the genre's sprawling bed of sounds, from the bass blown out rage music he helped popularize on his previous full-length Whole Lotta Red, to vintage Atlanta trap cuts complete with blaring horns and thudding 808s, to the smooth micro-chopped soul of Drake and early Kanye (both of whom are conspicuously absent from the project). Hell there's even some Clams Casino-era cloud rap on this thing. The one through line is Carti's voice which shapeshifts at rates unheard of even for him. On previous releases much was made about what new flow he would unveil, on MUSIC it seems as if one comes along every other song. There's "COCAINE NOSE" where he sounds like a pack-a-day smoker wrenching up blood with every ad-lib, or "JUMPIN" where he comes off as a mush-mouthed, monotone android, not to mention the syrup-soaked drawl he introduced on "ALL RED" or the equally laced warble from "2024" and "BACKR00MS." The overall effect is deliberately disorienting, giving the impression that Carti is not one but many artists, a hydra-like being speaking in mythical tongues.

At one point during the album's rollout Carti claimed that MUSIC would have no features, I wish he had stuck to the promise because the guests are frequently the low points of the record. Of course there are the contractually obligated Travis Scott collabs, four in total and each as lifeless as the last, but then there also three surprise appearances from current "Biggest Rapper Alive" Kendrick Lamar, officially cementing his status as new Drake. Lamar sounds fine but out of place, his West Coast slick-talking sitting at odds with the roiling chaos that surrounds him and leading to his presence on the record feeling like the product of an A&R brainstorm sesh rather than a real creative connection. Rounding out the list is the usual Carti coterie, Lil Uzi Vert turns in a pair of verses, one of which (again, "JUMPIN") is the only feature I actually enjoyed, Future and Skepta stop by to do the same thing they've been doing on other artist's songs for years, and Young Thug shows up to essentially make a Young Thug track. There's a much more interesting version of MUSIC that's all Carti, one in which he plows full steam ahead with his insane vision to remake all music in his image, but unfortunately that's not what we got this time around.

As for whether MUSIC is "good" or not, I'm unsure at this point. There are some great tracks (my favorites as of now are "BACKD00R," "OLYMPIAN," "OPM BABI" and "RATHER LIE," though I'll have more to say about that last one in a second), but ultimately it's just too much music to have a reasonable opinion about yet. One thing's for sure though, it's nowhere near the bold and exacting artistic statement that Whole Lotta Red was, and I doubt it will have anything close to the impact that album did. However, there's an interesting parallel to be made with another, almost equally sprawling and magpied record from ten years earlier, The Life of Pablo. Similar to his one-time mentee, Kanye decided to follow-up his darkest and harshest project to-date with one that attempted to capture the entire popular music zeitgeist in a single swoop. TLOP wasn't as influential as its predecessor Yeezus, but I would argue that it's a more enjoyable album to return to thanks to the strength of its songs and grandness of vision. Could MUSIC follow a comparable path? Maybe.

And now finally for the eight-hundred pound AI-generated elephant in the room. Last night a friend alerted me to some online chatter that Carti's vocals on "RATHER LIE" are entirely AI. The speculation arose because "RATHER LIE" sounds very similar to "Timeless," another Carti x Weeknd song that was all but confirmed to feature AI vocals. You can go down the rabbit hole yourself if you like but in my opinion the claims are credible enough to be believed, which is a shame. How does something like this happen? Well I think there are a few possible ways: one, the artist consciously and purposefully opted to use AI as a creative choice, two, the artist used the technology to reskin a reference track and hear how it might sound in their voice but then never got around to re-recording it, three, the artist did it in response to pressure from the label to make a hit song in such-and-such style. I think explanation one is pretty unlikely, because then why go to all the trouble of hiding it, leaving the real answer to probably be some combination of two and three, the label wanted another hit like "Timeless" so Carti's team came up with a reference and phoned in the execution.

Unfortunately I think things like this will only become more frequent in the major label system as the proliferation of generative AI continues. Capital and art don't mix, the pressure to extract more and more economic value from music will only lead to increasingly shadier business practices. I'm not against AI per se, but I am against coercion and deceit and its clear that the record industry believes this is the only way to leverage this technology, perhaps because they understand what apparently many people in Silicon Valley do not, which is that people don't give a fuck about art that comes from nowhere and is rooted in nothing. All of this lends Carti's "I AM MUSIC" statement a darkly prophetic connotation, a sign of the increasingly fraught and duplicitous cultural landscape we will be forced to navigate in the years to come. I pray we can make it through.