Wednesday 1/6: Playboi Carti—"Stop Breathing"
Today, we share our thoughts on the best song from Atlanta rapper Playboi Carti’s new album.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him) and Eric Bennett (they/them). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. Now we’re, also a M-F newsletter about songs. Our format is simple: a link to a song and a short take from each of us about what we think of it. Each day of the week has a corresponding genre: Monday is indie, Tuesday is punk, Wednesday is hip-hop, Thursday is pop, and Friday is misc.
Today, we share our thoughts on the best song from Atlanta rapper Playboi Carti’s new album.
Playboi Carti—"Stop Breathing"
Michael Brooks:
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Playboi Carti does all of his Christmas shopping at the last minute possible. His new album, the mesmerizing Whole Lotta Red, didn’t arrive like I had quite expected it would. The album begins with “Rockstar Made,” where Carti sounds like he’s in the booth mid-exorcism, his voice buried beneath an obnoxiously loud 808 as he frantically pieces ad-libs together. There are tons of moments on Whole Lotta Red that are really fucking loud, it’s almost as if Krampus stole the original album from Santa’s sleigh and slam dunked it into my chimney for me to have to untangle on Christmas morning. I’m going to go out on another limb here (two limbs? in THIS ECONOMY?!) and say that Whole Lotta Red is the best punk album of 2020 hands down.
Take “Stop Breathing” for instance, where Carti’s exasperated sighs and shrieks transform into a battle cry. It’s energetic and completely in your face, making even his most visceral songs from the past sound frail in comparison. He starts his verse off with “Ever since my brother died / I’ve been thinking ‘bout homicide,” echoing Waka Flocka Flame when he rapped “When my little brother died I said fuck school” on “Hard in da Paint” over ten years ago. You know what? This record is so good that I’m going to talk like Carti for the rest of my blurb. i'm +:) going . .$ to * ! +:) talk +:) like . carti *^ ! and there's ** - nothing :( you can do ** - about it , ^ 🦋* !+ eli . ** - no . .$ more stifling :( my * ! +:) creativity this ++** year ,🦋 i'm +** taking the newsletter over :( and there's nothing you can ** !++ do *^ ! about :( it . . .$ ok ! * +
Eli Enis:
Well, now I’m thinking ‘bout homicide. That was. . .something, Michael, glad you got it out of your system. I’ve listened to Whole Lotta Red a bunch since it dropped on Christmas Day and I think I like it more every time, but “Stop Breathing” is still the one I keep coming back to. I remember watching a live video of Carti performing “Home (KOD)” from his 2018 record Die Lit, and I was surprised to hear how ripped and raw his voice sounded on stage. He was yelling like a punk frontman, and the song’s hook, “Bring that money home, daddy waitin’ for it”, was transformed from a psychedelic mantra to a rambunctious mosh call.
On Whole Lotta Red, Carti brought that chest-puffing energy into the recorded setting, trading in his distinctive baby voice for raspy howls and throat-searing yelps. On Die Lit, producer Pierre Bourne’s prismatic beats established the sound, and it was up to Carti to shapeshift his voice to fill the pockets and find linear melodies in the beat equivalent to a hall of mirrors. Carti’s in charge on WLR, and the relatively straightforward instrumentals give him the space to fully form the dimensions of the villainous, traumatized, anti-social romantic he portrays on these songs.
Maybe you came into this newsletter hot because I dubbed “Stop Breathing” the record’s best track in the subhed, which is perhaps a controversial take. There are certainly other songs with better lyricism, more complex melodies, and more unexpected compositional twists, but I think “Stop Breathing” is the most vocally impressive song on the record—and the most memorable. The Gucci Mane interpolation, “I take my shirt off and all the hoes stop breathing,” has been Carti-fied with Pop Rocks ad-libs and deep vocal manipulation, simulating the part of the rollercoaster when you blast through a pitch-black tunnel. Everyone screams so loud that it briefly deafens the clattering tracks below, and this song feels like 3:39 seconds of that hellishly transcendental moment.
After that initial hook, when Carti comes tearing in with, “Ever since my brother died,” he’s pushing his voice to a volume and a range that I didn’t think he was capable of. Throughout the entire verse that follows, he continues to contort it into all different shapes and contours; hollow-point triplets, scrappy roars, and a white-eyed wail that forgoes Die Lit’s gleaming auto-tune to emphasize the palpable textures of his unvarnished, and almost off-key, moan. Carti likens himself to a vampire on Whole Lotta Red, but on “Stop Breathing” I think he sounds more like a werewolf; growly, fierce, and thirsty to tear someone to shreds, not just drain their blood. I think there were a lot of great punk songs and albums in 2020, but I can’t think of any that are as carnal as this.