Heavy Rotation: January 2021
Heavy Rotation is my monthly paid subscriber newsletter where I take some time to do some deep listening and deep consideration of new music I’ve discovered over the past month. I nerd out a bit about the songs and include a private playlist. Hope you enjoy!
On Christmas Day, Atlanta rapper Playboi Carti released the highly anticipated Whole Lotta Red to a mixed response from fans online. Similar to the fever pitch proceeding Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake, I found it strange that fans were acting as if they had been experiencing a D’Angelo-sized layoff when the last Carti album came out in May 2018. But I guess expectations have changed as the streaming era has escalated. I’m happy that I ignored the initial noise surrounding the release to listen to it at my own pace last month after the hype had dissipated.
Despite what online commenters might have you think, the album is neither classic nor trash. What we have here is a perfectly fine release that is inspired by a particularly forgotten (and usually forgettable) corner of hip-hop history: the DatPiff / LiveMixtapes era. Sonically, Whole Lotta Red harkens back to southern rap from around 2005, when rough, cheaply produced digital mixtapes were the order of the day.
Much of the album recalls early Gucci Mane, especially on songs like “JumpOutTheHouse” and “Stop Breathing,” which directly references Gucci’s “Shirt Off” in its chorus. What used to be an accidental lack of production value in the mid-2000s is now done intentionally as homage. The songs here are lovingly raw, urgent and impressionistic, sometimes only hinting at musical conventions like song structure. Those are the best moments on WLR, when Carti’s natural strangeness is unconstrained. The album stacks similar tracks back-to-back so they end up resembling two silhouettes bouncing up and down on an alley wall at night. There are a pair of cuts where he spells out the chorus and of course, they’re bound together.
Carti grows with every album, amping up the rasp after beguiling and delighting the world by rapping like a newborn infant for a year. But once something becomes memeable, it’s time to move on. Punk energy permeates Whole Lotta Red. The rock star cliche is in full effect: there’s a song named after Slayer, others called “Rockstar Made” and “Punk Monk.” At one point, he says “we the new Black Flag!” “Die4Guy” is replete with canned guitar samples. I find contemporary rap’s obsession with the rock star stereotype interesting because it feels like more of a tribute to the ideas of “rock” as a genre and “rock star” as an abstract concept than being inspired by any actual rock music.
Check out the rest of the playlist and the link after the paywall.
