Sunday night at Rolling Loud at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood looked like the biggest night of Playboi Carti’s life. But for about 15 minutes in the middle of the set, his show nearly boiled over.
On Friday, Carti — the gothic Atlanta emcee whose mix of extreme-metal sonics and disorienting trap music made him a Gen Z megastar—released ”Music,” his long-awaited third album. Carti rug-pulling the album last minute was a longstanding meme, so when the 30-track LP actually hit the streamers, fans were delirious. Rap’s Nosferatu had finally sailed into town.
With tens of thousands of fans packed into the main stage on Sunday night, matching Carti’s cryptic but unhinged energy, the mood was intense. Mosh pits were inevitable, but Carti’s are a breed apart.
To Rolling Loud’s credit, once things got heated, the promoters left no chance of disaster. A dozen songs in, the house lights went up, Carti left the stage and the screens told fans to back up, now in an effort to stop the crowd from pushing forward and crushing each other.
“We’ll pay any curfew fines so Carti can do his whole set,” the organizers said over the loudspeakers as they pulled people out of the crowd. “Everyone calm down and take three steps back.”
Twenty minutes later, the show was back on, with the Weeknd crooning “Rather Lie” and “Timeless” surrounded by Carti’s Opium crew while pyro and chugging guitars flared around them. Carti fans come for the chaos — is the rest of the music industry ready for him on the A-list?
Since his 2017 mixtape debut, Carti has captivated rap fans for the feral intensity of his sound and his Suicide-riffing album art, facial piercings and occult mystique. He’s not a technically-astute rapper in the way Kendrick Lamar is, but he’s a visionary of smeared ad libs, freaky voices and inside-out timing. Kendrick loves him; Lamar guests on “Music,” and calls Carti “my evil twin” on “Good Credit.”
Much of the pre-show chatter was speculating if Lamar would pop out during Carti’s set. He did not, alas, though it’s fair to raise an eyebrow at Lamar vigorously co-signing a guy recently arrested for choking his pregnant girlfriend just weeks after winning Grammys for calling Drake a deadbeat pedophile.
But Lamar is no one’s moral savior, and if you think Carti’s atypical in extreme music circles, well, we’ve got a burned church in Norway to sell you.
What Carti brought to Rolling Loud was a volatile proposition — some of the most truly transgressive music to ever top streaming and Billboard charts, aesthetically uncompromising and veiled with real menace. Carti is to the TikTok era what Black Sabbath was in the ‘70s: bracing, wicked, new.
This was Carti’s first show since the release of “Music,” and he got to most of it on Sunday. Long-teased tracks like “K Pop” and “Mojo Jojo” found their context in the red-lining churn and digital degrade of Carti’s catalog. Cackling descents into trap hell like “Cocaine Nose” and “Evil J0rdan” flipped into plaintive, melodic singles like “BackD00r,” which proved Carti can dip his keys into a songwriterly streak as well (there’s a reason the Weeknd has him as an opener on his stadium tour right now).
When Carti has more traditional rappers like Lamar or Skepta as a guest, or especially the Weeknd’s keening romance on a hook, there’s a hint of how generationally good this music could be if he put a little more ballast into his rapping and writing. The same goes for his live performances. Carti’s famous for his misdirection onstage, only appearing in flashes on screens and hiding in a roiling sea of fog and flames.
But there’s a line between entrancing vagueness and just not being that present — there were long stretches where Carti seemed to leave the stage entirely while pre-recorded lead vocals still played. That was probably fine for this show to the faithful, and no one working today can match the mercurial strangeness of Carti’s complete vision. But Carti clearly wants to be regarded as a defining, boundary-pushing artist of our time. He absolutely is, and he’s smashing streaming records while doing it. His Rolling Loud set reaffirmed that one-of-one status — even if he can’t coast on his plague ship forever.
