I'm in My Playboi Carti Era and It Started With a Piercing

Every time Carti drops anything the old Carti versus new Carti conversation starts right back up and our pod was no different. Ray pulled up a new Carti snippet off TikTok on episode five of Inside The Screen and you could hear it right away. It didn't sound like him exactly, it sounded like a mix of some old and some new with him rapping more like the MUSIC era. And the split is real. A lot of OG fans still want the Die Lit Carti and the new stuff sounds like a different person to them.

I'm not here to settle that one. What I can tell you is I believe I'm in my Playboi Carti era right now and that goes way past one album.

It's the world he's building

I like the aesthetic. I'm really loving the world he's building. If you look at the run it makes sense. Die Lit came out in May 2018 and debuted at number three on the Billboard 200. Whole Lotta Red dropped on Christmas 2020 and went number one. Then MUSIC came out in March 2025 and debuted at number one with 298,000 units. Every one of those sounds different and every one of those looks different and the people who were mad at the last one usually come around by the next one. That's what world building looks like to me, it's the sound, the look and the whole camp moving together.

Carti is why I got pierced

I'm not even gonna front about this part. One of the main reasons I even got piercings, or the push that really got me to go do it, was probably Carti. I was looking at him with the dermal like let me see what that can look like. So I started playing around with the ear piercings and once I got the ear piercing I'm like okay, let's go get the nose piercing.

I would be crazy if I didn't say that's the real power of an artist like this. He's putting songs in your ear and on top of that he's changing what people around the country are walking into a shop and asking for. That's the same reason I like an artist like Nine Vicious, it's the not being careful about it. I wrote about why I think Nine Vicious is the king of the underground right now too. And it's the same thing I see with the most stylish gamers, the fit is part of the world.

The live show has to catch up

Now here's where I'm gonna be fair. I saw the Carti performance at Rolling Loud and I think the crowd was going crazy, however he gave an okay performance. Something I think Carti is probably gonna be doing more is performing more because I think he needs to. All the content stuff is cool and all but if you're really trying to be an artist and you want good crowd control and presence you need to be performing and you need to be practicing that part of your craft. We've seen what Rolling Loud does for artists up close, like when we did Cxmmunity x Rolling Loud Miami.

The world is built and the fit is built so the live show is the one piece left that has to match the rest of it.

Stay with Lonely

I also had a hot take on Destroy Lonely while we were talking Opium because a lot of people have been saying he fell off. What I really think Lonely is doing is he has a bigger music taste and he probably doesn't know where to put his pocket at yet. I've been hearing some of his EDM stuff and I'm right there with him. Ray's been more of a Ken Carson guy and felt like Lonely's last couple projects were boring, but even he agreed Jumanji is one of Lonely's best songs when I brought it up.

That's what I mean about the camp moving together. When the leader is building a world the people around him get room to try stuff too.

So which Carti are you riding with, the Die Lit Carti or the one building the world right now? Tell me in the CXM Discord.