He’s still reliant upon shallow clichés and works with only fragments of ideas. While Carti has done plenty to prove himself as a rap-hook machine, his melodic choruses on a few tracks show some yet-untapped creative potential. He not only has the energy to keep up with the main star in “Shoota,” but he also constructs verses in a similar fashion, more as a collection of hooks than a statement of intent. It comes as no surprise that Lil Uzi Vert is once again best-suited as a collaborator. For instance, that performance on “Poke It Out” makes a strong case that recreating Carti’s style is tougher than it may seem: Nicki’s own take of his rush of hooks and key phrases sounds labored, lacking that fury of on-the-spot inspiration. Minaj’s appearance on “Poke It Out” is one of the many moments where a guest’s performance reveals unseen dimensions to Carti as a rapper. The latter track especially seems made with its guest in mind, with its tumbling yet sticky construction fitting for both Carti and Keef’s own pop-oriented projects. His glistening melodies grace two of the album’s pop standouts, “Poke It Out” with Nicki Minaj and “Mileage” with Chief Keef. But he mostly sticks to iridescent synths that define his signature sound.
A welcome new entry is the blown-out bass roaring underneath “R.I.P,” a track that already feels disorienting with Carti’s multiple voices buzzing around.
Like on Carti’s previous record, Bourne produces most of the album’s glossy, alien sounds. Regardless of the outcome, their efforts only give more definition to the elusive Carti.
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The guests on the album also must figure out how to complement such an unpredictable voice. “Pull Up” makes that evident: the rapper constructs most of the track by making nothing but random, throwaway noises, and his trusted producer Pi’erre Bourne gets tasked with providing an appropriate environment to neatly house the cacophony. What becomes more apparent on this full-length is that it’s not Carti who must adapt his style to the culture at large, but the other way around. That embrace of the fleeting and the spontaneous stands as the defining characteristic of his music. He crowds his tracks with ad libs, which function both as compelling sound effects and permanent placeholders to occupy a material void. On his debut studio album, Die Lit, Playboi Carti’s formula remains relatively the same as found on last year’s self-titled mixtape: the rapper recites lines and hooks driven by impulse, no matter how underdeveloped, like these sparks of ideas would immediately disappear if he didn’t put them on record.
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