Vamp Life Spooky

Playboi Carti featuring Kendrick Lamar and Jhené Aiko “Backd00r”

It’s impressive to make a rap song featuring Kendrick Lamar in 2025 where he’s maybe the third or fourth most interesting thing on the track. So what am I putting ahead of him? Well, there’s that sample loop. It’s a very Kanye sort of sped-up R&B vocal, and we’ve now got enough distance from his artistic prime that the chipmunk soul aesthetic is as nostalgic as the music that gets chopped up to make it. But I digress. The interesting thing is how BAD the loop sounds. It’s lo-fi, but not in the “4-track cassette” way, but a low bitrate mp3 with severe artifacts way. It’s fascinating to hear that sound get aestheticized, but as Brian Eno once said, “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.” It was inevitable that this would be the thing for mp3s.

The other interesting element is Playboi Carti’s vocal, which I suppose isn’t tremendously different from a lot of his output, but comes across very well on this particular song. He’s a slippery presence, and he often sounds like he’s flirting with the beat. There’s rapping going on here – hashtag rapping, no less! – but he has a way of making it feel weightless or invisible. It’s all little bursts of enthusiasms and sensuality, sorta like if Lil Wayne stripped out all his technical prowess to focus entirely on his charming ad-libs.

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