“The rhyme has to be perfect, the delivery flawless,” he asserts on his new album, lamenting the burden of his genius while boasting about the fastidiousness of his craft. It’s almost impossible to imagine an Eminem song working this way, especially for Eminem. Carti doesn’t offer lofty metaphors, or sky-written punchlines, or any kind of traditional narrative arc – but that doesn’t stop every sound that materializes on his tongue from sounding electric, spontaneous and alive. You can hear it in one of the year’s most mesmerizing songs, “Magnolia” by Playboi Carti, an itchy club anthem jammed with stalled rhymes and clipped syllables. And it denies our yearning for resolution, which makes it feel a lot like life. This makes their music feel chaotic, unpredictable, disordered. In recent years, young rappers have been decorating time in more lifelike ways, letting their words go blurry and slack, hedging their verses with fat pockets of dead air. They give us tension and resolution – the very things that make novels, movies and serial television so essential in our imaginative lives. Veterans such as Eminem and Black Thought tend to be meticulous, offering an orderly sequence of verbal events, a steady drip of rhymed conclusions, sometimes even a proper story with a beginning, middle and end. It’s important to remember that this generational clash is really just a clash of techniques – rappers of all ages are ultimately tasked with decorating time, and there are different ways to do it.
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