Playboi Carti and His Offspring Ponder Life After Rage-Rap

What does it mean that the most meaningful and galvanic artist in contemporary rap music often appears to be retreating from the throne?

Playboi Carti recently released his fourth full-length release, “Music,” which has spent most of the last month atop the Billboard album chart. “Music,” which aggregates 30 songs even if it doesn’t quite stitch them together, is a vivid of-the-moment document of the ways hip-hop has been splintering, lyrically and musically, over the past few years.

Carti is a deconstructionist, the latest in a line of Atlanta rappers taking the genre in increasingly chaotic directions. He’s maybe the truest and loudest exponent of the post-Drake realignment of hip-hop — indebted to Travis Scott’s amplified yelps, the skittishness of several microgenerations of SoundCloud rap, the growth of rap festival culture and its emphasis on physicality, and the way fans on the internet now aggregate around obscurity as much as ubiquity.

For these tumultuous times, Carti is a king, even if he’s more often in hiding from than courting the spotlight. “Music” is a reflection of his ambivalence about that fate. In part, it’s a doubling down on the things that have made him so special — vocal tics, insistent shards of rhyme, a sense that he’s retreating even as he’s moving forward. But it also reflects his growing profile and the obligations, or at least opportunities, that come with it, with the addition of several well-known guests.

Whereas his last album, the scene-defining “Whole Lotta Red” from 2020, had a single-mindedness that verged on hardcore, “Music” is less focused, and attempts to solve several problems at once.