Settling into spooky season…
Alfred Soto: In honor of its 10-year anniversary I listened to Rich Gang’s Tha Tour Pt. 1, a model for Lil Uzi Vert and other rappers in Young Thug’s wake. Playboi Carti’s weed-raspy baby voice made him part of that lineage. It’s gone for “All Red,” where he sounds so much like Future it’s like his engineers used AI: Future without the affect-free declarations of variable weirdness, that is. There ain’t much to hold on to here.
[5]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: For a moment there, Carti looked like some kind of savant — a novel sound generator so potent that he could cause otherwise thoughtful critics (myself included) to forget or ignore a noxious personal life. “All Red” instead asks: what if he just made the 30th best Future song of the year?
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Nortey Dowuona: Most of this song is a damn near perfect Future impression with worryingly thin lyrics which gain no strength despite the voice. Also flimsy attempts at satanic panic schtick.
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Ian Mathers: The first YouTube comment along the lines of “this new future single goes krazy fr” might have been moderately funny, but god they’ve really rendered that particular dead horse down to its constituent atoms over there. This is still more fun to listen to than the last couple of Future songs we’ve covered here anyway. (“Like That” doesn’t count and you know exactly why.)
[6]
Jel Bugle: I really enjoyed Playboi Carti’s rap on Camila’s magnificent “I Luv It.” I like this one: it’s quite sinister, all sinister vibes, It’s short and just ends, but maybe that’s the moodiness Playboi Carti is trying to convey.
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Mark Sinker: Always when I hear Playboi Carti I want him to be taking what he does — re-processing speech into weird absurdist fragments — as far as he possible can. So far he hasn’t and this, once again, is not that.
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Taylor Alatorre: What’s black and white and red all over and lacks a clear reason to exist, other than to swap out an aging yet still exploitable vocal gimmick for a considerably less distinctive and personable one?
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Dave Moore: Oh no, this time Playboi Carti accidentally launched his time machine into the past instead of the future. (I was wrong, by the way — “@ Meh” is a [9], not a [6]. I suppose we all get turned around sometimes.)
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Katherine St. Asaph: Needs more B-movie schlock. Needs more, really, in general.
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