Playboi Carti — Die Lit ANALYSIS & REVIEW
Published 05/21/2018
Oh no. This absolutely sucks. And here’s why. Starting with perhaps the most phoned-in, careless, and utterly boring rap style that I’ve ever had the misfortune to sit through for an hour, there was absolutely no engagement to be found for any listener who has even the most basic of conceptions or experiences in the art of music. There was a complete lack of thoughtful rhythmic manipulation in any of the exhaustively repeated melodic lines, which is sadly the chief ingredient within this particular style that forgoes pitch or background development. With percussive beats as simple and as reserved as this, from the unchanging slow 4/4 meter to the unchanging delivery in electronic rim hits and claps, the solo vocals essentially have to carry the load by providing at the very least some sort of evidence that the lines were created with emotional, purposeful intent.
These melodies did not even get to step 1, being perhaps the worst attempt at melodic intrigue I’ve heard since starting this blog. There was simply no evidence that these lines were meant to be listened to. The entire melodic organization here was done so blindly and self-centeredly with no extra thought about direction, simply plopping down as something to add to this overrun, pathetic sound and seeming like the fact of its existence alone was all that was needed. That’s just wrong. These lines melted into nothing more than slow, basic speech with very annoying and persistent metric accents. This was repetitive narration with a beat, and it really made a mockery of rap and what rap can potentially bring to the table.
Every song was layered exactly the same way with three obvious, texturally distinctive layers, and it was both the lack of effort to inject life through musical variety and the lack of talent in finding any sort of depth with these layers that makes this a complete waste of time. I’ve already mentioned two of the layers, being the vocals and the electronic beat, with the third one being a harmonic synth that delivered nothing but unnecessary, uncared for repetitions of uninteresting chords that led nowhere and gave no support to anything around it. Again, this was something simply heaped onto the structure for the sake of it just to be there and recreate a flat, unworthy, yet familiar atmosphere. That’s essentially two-thirds of the music coming across as purposeless fluff, and annoying repetitive fluff at that.
It’s an atmosphere so devoid of nourishment that it’s difficult to breathe in for people who have a sense as to what else has been done and is being done in the outside world. It’s also a difficult pill to swallow that this has gotten so much attention and listens. My rationalization comes from the simple fact that music plays a different role in life from person to person, and that’s totally fine. I just take that a step further and claim that those on the spectrum who are realistically enthusiastic about the art to those who have devoted their lives to it will likely not find anything of worth on this album either, and it should be noted that those are the people who are the actual innovators and are the ones beneficial to the art’s growth; in other words, not Playboi Carti or Playboi Carti fans.
There’s no sense in comparing this, or any piece of music, to nothing but the musician’s history or the obvious attempted style. Look at it for what it actually is: an hour of three uninteresting, dull, repetitive musical instruments trying to recreate an emotion of chill for an average modern day listener who doesn’t like to think too much. This entire album honestly could have been written in 15 minutes. Yes, love hurts, but for music lovers, listening to this album arguably hurts just as much.
