Hip-hop is a medium of giants -- big characters, big punchlines, big emotions -- but could a minimalist ever become a star? On his first two LPs, Playboi Carti crafted a language of frayed ends, yelps, adlibs melting into verses and vice versa. The trick, it turned out, was to emphasize the destructive aspects of minimalism -- more Wire than Young Marble Giants, in other words -- but there remained an enigma at the center. More recently, as if to exacerbate the problem, he began rapping in a baby voice. A cult of Carti emerged around this void. Who is Playboi Carti, if not an aesthetic? Last year's Whole Lotta Red, at an untrendy 60+ minutes, is definitionally Carti's most revealing album, and also not: It appears to be a concept album about being a vampire. There are Transylvania synth lines, bloodthirsty backstage meet-and-greets, odes to the yawning night sky. So, perhaps he is just another young, beautiful man letting the drugs fade out on a red-eye from Dubai, but the comparison to Future is telling. There was nowhere else to go from there -- so why not dissolve?
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