I wish I wrote this Vol. 1

A new series on things I wish I wrote

Hello all, this is a new series I’ll be experimenting with where I take a piece of writing I really enjoyed and speak to why I liked it and explore any other related thoughts. In this first edition, I’ll be focusing on Ben Brutocao’s short piece on Playboi Carti. Enjoy.

As someone looking to gain as much perspective as possible, I do a lot of reading. Given I’ve spent most of my life trying to better my own practice, seeing others execute interesting ideas well incites a special kind of fire. Good writing, that is, a good idea explored to its clearest extent, is what I’d like to imagine we’re all chasing. It means different things to different topics and ideas, and it’s never duplicated. But, like a supreme court justice once said about pornography, ‘I know it when I see it.’

So, when I stumbled upon Ben Brutocao’s piece on Playboi Carti- I knew it. For those unfamiliar with Mr. Cartier, he’s a south Atlanta rapper that’s anything but your typical rhyme slinger. Experimenting with ethereal synth backgrounds and a kind of lyricism that, to the uninitiated, may seem lazy, Carti occupies a unique space in the increasingly diverse landscape of modern rap. But it’s here in the explication of Playboi Carti and the surrounding milieu that one could and should divert to the ample verbiage provided by Ben. Brutocao’s colorful characterization synthesizes everything a casual admirer of Carti both wants and needs to hear with specificity and expertise that would find itself at home amongst the most capable of lyricists.

The piece brilliantly straddles the line between an authentic description of what adjectives can only hope to illustrate in Carti’s music, and a kind of playful, sardonic tone that pays homage to the internet-laden superstardom of the subject. But what the short essay does perhaps most interestingly is that which seems impossible. In the parlance of imagery that only hints at the experience of Playboi Carti, it adequately describes what it is to enjoy his music.

Any one of my closest confidants, otherwise known as the battered group of individuals subject to my unfiltered thought process, know I’m something of a tortured soul. And not tortured in the performative sense or that which could inform some sort of wonderful creation as a contingent result, just someone who often struggles to sleep because they’re thinking about how a white guy with way too much money is trolling the bottom of the ocean for metals needed to power the inevitable green economy. Or how the guy who shot a hole through progressive legislature attempting to hamper the coal industry’s untrammeled will in destroying the ecology of West Virginia will have significant influence on the US’s move towards a ‘sustainable energy economy.’ Or how modern fish farming, at a fundamental level, is subverting the natural processes brought to us by the perfection of natural evolution in a way that is bound to piss off the cosmically sentient entity that governs existence. And so on. All this to say, it can be difficult for me to relax sometimes. Mainly because I’m wracked with the guilt of feeling responsible for not doing more about *gestures to everything*.

So when our new God, known as the algorithm, brought me renditions of Playboi Carti (slowed + reverb), it slid past my defenses. As Ben denotes, there are barely, if any, empty lyrics to be cynical about. There’s not, at least to those without a deep appreciation of musical physics, much to cling onto in terms of complicated rhythms. It’s often pretty plain to those with a more nuanced appreciation of sonic expression. But what Ben hints at both in description and allusion is the value of that perceived simplicity and the context in which it thrives.

Technically speaking, Carti hasn’t actually made the vast majority of the music I’ve found myself head bobbing to at 3 AM. Heck, it’s not even officially released. It’s the work of a hive mind fan base that takes leaked tracks and excerpts from live shows to create a careful tapestry of imagined works. In some way, shape, or form, it’s all masterfully puppeteered by Carti. However much credit you’d like to give him, the veritable goldmine of mainlined vibes is his doing, and it’s arguable that the release process supersedes the normative functions of the music industry apparatus. With mixed reviews of his latest release, I couldn’t help but think it really doesn’t matter. No longer are artists like Carti giving us a finished product to admire, allowing some slight leeway in how it can be perceived; they’re inviting us into the room via the internet and letting fans that found their way to these sacred communities have their way with the canvas. People like Carti still are setting the lights, opening the door, and providing the colors, but the process is becoming more open-source.

Ben, in his infinite wisdom, mentions all of this much better than I could. But what resonated most powerfully is the catatonia inherent to Carti’s take on the genre he does well to illustrate. The anxiety-ridden hell-sponge sitting behind my slow eyes can’t ever be fully subdued without the aid of powerful inebriants, but Playboi Carti and his distinctly modern fanbase gives me the chance to put it on a spit and fry it in the fires of digitally created vaporap. Most of the time, I have no idea what he’s even saying, but boy does it sound good.