Playboi Carti's 'MUSIC' + Addison Rae's 'Addison'

Considering the two albums side by side, thinking about popular music in 2025.

As a matter of necessity, pop music contends with its own relatability. The singer and listener need not feel the exact same way about things, but their attentional apertures need to overlap to some meaningful degree, even if they’re coming at something from opposite angles. The artist-audience relationship could be aspirational, or it could be the parasocial simulation of direct identification. This person is my friend, or basically my friend. I’m not going to think about what that means exactly, but they are in my life, in my headphones, talking to me. Fanbases feel a sense of ownership over the artists they idolize. Artists have become people who live alongside you in the imaginary register. You want them to be a certain way so you can keep your life going a certain way, or transform it. If an artist changes their aesthetic unfavorably, the disappointment is personal.

People are fans of Carti not just because he makes good music, but because he is strange. His world is esoteric and unpredictable. He bends his image and sound. Meanwhile, Addison Rae’s fanbase appreciates her autonomous, carefree vibe: when so much music today involves overtly self-serious worldbuilding, she seems to do her own thing without much pretence. Carti’s fans also gravitate towards his authenticity, even as it is entangled with explorations of obfuscation. Where Rae’s debut album Addison is a pop bildungsroman, Carti’s recent full-length MUSIC introduces additional layers of ambiguity into the perception of its creator’s narrative.

These two albums showcase divergent postures with relation to relatability, but they both implicitly acknowledge that these days it’s as much about the music being made as the fact that it’s arriving from a particular person’s niche universe, during a particular “era” of their trajectory. Artists construct their appearances in the public imaginary as cross-channel branded experiences amendable to a wide variety of consumer contexts; many of the tableaux presented on MUSIC and Addison are either so general or so specific that they are accessible to everyone and no one simultaneously. Their sonic palettes tend to be vague, placeless, or internally interchangeable, providing something like a sense of minimum viable context. Audience consumption expresses itself prominently through activities of observation, adoration, and a borderline-nonverbal feeling: “I like this.”

***

It is unlikely that MUSIC is uneven because of a newfound skill issue. Carti still has vision: it is tough to dispute this. In the year-or-so before the album’s release, the lead-up run of singles were mostly terrific – on “DIFFERENT DAY” and “HBA,” his vocals balanced experimentation with precision, while the instrumentals took a scalpel to trap’s most elemental components, reduced them, and xeroxed the skeleton left behind. 

These new songs sat in a perpendicular relation to his previous work. 2020’s Whole Lotta Red marked a severe departure from the relatively elegiac “mumble rap” that made him popular: heavily distorted, compressed to infinity, and claustrophobically traversed by screams, yelps, and growls. With these new singles, there was a sense that he was starting to go back and sample his own repertoire: certain percussive elements carried over from WLR, but the vibe was completely different: more oneiric and receded. He wasn’t screaming anymore. The newer material was bleaker, dissociated, and not particularly adrenalized. At ease with being out of joint. These singles also broadcast his decision to change his flow and his voice yet again: earlier in his career he was comfortably midrange in pitch, and while Whole Lotta Red was squeaky – SLATT! – he now embraced a gravely register. He didn’t simply change pitch, but also the way he sounded in the booth. Additionally, he reinvented how he presented, embracing a baggier, aughts-influenced look.

On “FINE SHIT,” track 9 on MUSIC, he raps “I just canceled one of my shows to watch me a film.” Carti doesn’t merely have a highly-flexible relationship to his own persona: he is notoriously picky and noncommittal when it comes to releasing music. He is comfortable making fans wait years for an album while canceling tours multiple times over. This ambivalence about normative expectations regarding his “music career” extends to the quality of MUSIC: there are about 10-12 very good-to-great songs, and a lot of not very good songs on the 30-track album, later extended to 34 on the Sorry 4 Da Wait extended version. 

The Kendrick collaborations are forgettable, as are the songs with The Weeknd and Lil Uzi Vert. Tracks like “FINE SHIT” and “RATHER LIE” fail to hold interest, pushed only to a sort of minimum-viable gestalt. Production never does more than it needs to in order to craft an atmosphere; many of the beats are composed of semi-anonymous, modular parts seemingly intended to merely perform their tasks proficiently. The record is content with its imperfections because it primarily seeks to create evocations rather than perfect finished products: exemplified by the instrumental for “TOXIC,” the most distinct character of some of these tracks is their relative characterlessness. WLR also deployed degraded audio quality, but there was holistic coherence and momentum across the record. In contrast, stretches of MUSIC sound intentionally “unfinished” or jumbled together. Overall, it’s less a coherent statement than an evanescent sketch of a series of vibes or suggestions. The thesis or provocation seems to be: the co-presence of this material, transiently conjoined in one place despite discontinuities, is enough. 

The relevant gesture here is the assembly and dispersal of a network of loosely-related signifiers, the construction of a possibility space to test relationships between elements – a snare here, a turn of phrase there – and provisionally observe their interplay. There’s a Kippenberger quote invoked at the beginning of David Joselit’s “Painting Beside Itself,” which asks the question: how does painting belong to a network? The Cologne artist offers the following: “Simply to hang a painting on the wall and say that it’s art is dreadful. The whole network is important! Even spaghettini… When you say art, then everything possible belongs to it. In a gallery that is also the floor, the architecture, the color of the walls.” The formulation proposes that materials traditionally conceived of as non-art be introduced into our notion of art. This process of conceptual addition is undertaken in order to accurately account for what is considered to already be the case.

By showcasing these provisional-sounding songs and drawing attention to the network of materials constituting them, Carti performs a subtractive operation that ends up smudging the coherence that has characterized previous eras of his work. On the pre-album version of “HBA,” Carti ends the track with a ruminative aphorism: “Now I can finally sleep / I let the sun, I let the sun lead me home / I let the moon, I let the moon set me up.” It is removed for the album version. MUSIC largely ditches this sense of integrated spirit in order to explore the disjointed intricacies of material construction, the arrangement of components, the tuning of a series of transient media objects.

***

Pride of place is given to moodboards in each of the Addison Rae profiles I have read. From Rolling Stone, by Brittany Spanos:

“I walked in with a binder, and I made a slideshow,” Rae says [of her career-changing meeting with Columbia Records CEO Ron Perry]. The presentation was full of pictures and word clouds that she felt represented who she would be as a performer. “I just mood-boarded my vibes. I literally had no music to play him at that point, so it was about trust. Like, ‘Yes, I’m in the clouds, and I enjoy being there. But I’m also serious.’”

“With Addison, it can come down to a rock she saw,” [Addison co-producer Luka] Kloser adds. “She’ll bring up a specific tree and say, ‘This is what “Diet Pepsi” feels like.’ And if Addison Rae says that tree is ‘Diet Pepsi,’ that tree is ‘Diet Pepsi.’”

From Elle, by Suzy Exposito:

“When we first met, Addison was showing me moodboards for the album,” [creative consultant Lexee] Smith says. “She is the Pinterest queen. Now everything has come true. It’s so weird. It keeps happening. We’re like little fairies.”

The presence of a moodboard in Addison Rae’s creative process is not remarkable in and of itself: it is a common tool across creative industries, useful for communicating concepts and organizing ideas. The moodboard can either facilitate a consolidation process – the distillation of a common denominator – or a centrifugal sprawl, where connections become tenuous and frayed. 

Where the Carti record allows indeterminately meaningful or informationally noisy elements to circulate, Rae’s record is strikingly focused. With song titles like “New York,” “High Fashion,” and “Summer Forever,” the listener isn’t worried about missing any metaphors: the communicative gesture is economical and precise in its selection of compositional elements, moods, and signifying materials. We might hear this organizational austerity as a turn against certain maximalist trends across both popular music and the “underground.” In a recent discussion about this prevalence of dramatic, high-intensity sound design, the artist James Hoff half-jokingly complained to me that “cinema ruined music,” and we talked about how certain sound effect-laden, maximally attention-grabbing styles can function as preemptive strikes against interiority in listening.

In recent years we have witnessed the blending together of distraction and engagement through the advanced industrialization of music. While evidence of this intensification can be found across genres – we might think of it as a further development of the loudness wars – its tendencies are purposefully crystallized in hyperpop, which serves as a sort of inverse model of Addison’s approach. On certain hyperpop songs, there’s a compositional asceticism at work, using minimalist arrangements to declutter sonic space in order to allow attention to be commanded entirely by maximalist components. Instead of giving the listener room to focus deeply on any particular element, there’s a super-compressed, constant succession of all-at-onceness. Pop music’s core elements are compulsively intensified, borrowing Maya B. Kronic’s turn of phrase from our interview earlier this year. Rae takes up this compositional style – which pares extraneous detail back in order to identify key inflection points – but inverts it, replacing jolts of sheer intensity with mellower, durational stretches of joie de vivre. Addison’s relatively spare, melody-forward songs don’t close in on their audience or spur them to the highest planes; they live alongside the listener. There’s an affecting, uncanny just thereness to these songs.

The compelling thing is that this sense of all-at-onceness is somehow retained; there’s almost a binaural beat-like psychoacoustic effect on parts of the album, particularly “Summer Forever” and “Times Like These.” The latter could be thought of as a distillation of a tune like Air’s “All I Need,” mapping out its affective attractor basins and eliminating materials extraneous to the central mood-thesis and its core earworm effect. Indeed, the album lays explicit claim to the musical heritage of the 2000s: on the one hand, we can hear restagings of globalization pop’s compositional strategies – Madonna’s Ray of Light is a clear touchpoint – while on the other there are obvious references to the Britney Spears era. Beyond the album’s sound, consider the aesthetics of its cover, or the fact that it was produced by Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser, members of MxM Publishing, founded by Max Martin. The Swedish super-producer is known for his work on era-defining material by the likes of Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and countless others.

There is a key difference regarding the organization of time and sensation between Martens’ aughts hits and Addison Rae’s debut album. If you listen to "Oops!... I Did It Again", certain transition sections introduce variation in order to intensify the arrival of maximum excitation points: instruments fall away, space is made, a voice stands out more than it did in the previous section, and the miraculous pop moment hits. All of this is to say that, at key instants, change is underscored at the expense of extended durational continuity. There’s an emphasis on verticalized moments that stand out starkly against the horizontal register.¹ The internally variegated song form relies upon such transition points in order to effectively implement a beginning-middle-end structure. 

Addison goes in the opposite direction, where figure and ground blur into a different kind of immersive pop music. Aughts pop frequently sutures the audience in by providing openings in which the listener might find themselves; Addison somehow draws the listener in – or lives alongside them – by restricting the aperture in which they might appear. The spectacular instant becomes a kind of highly industrialized spectacular duration. The listener’s attention is drawn not to a particular inflection point but is rather distributed more evenly throughout a song.

***

Both MUSIC and Addison create touchpoints with which a listener might interact. Calling these anchorpoints would be too definitive: the zone of engagement is designed to be transient, provisional, specifically exciting because it’s both there and not-there, directed at the listener, alongside but not around them. Time’s passing feels compelling, different things move through it. Then the song ends and things dissipate without ceremony or fanfare: not into some totally undifferentiated general equivalence of sounds and styles, but into an opening with a certain structure, demanding something.

1. See Jonathan D. Kramer’s “Moment Form in Twentieth-Century Music” in Breaking the Sound Barrier (1981.)