Playboi Carti Interview with i-D Magazine

There’s something pertinent about the way that, on the day Tupac Shakur drew his last breath in a Las Vegas hospital room, some 2000 miles away Jordan Terrell Carter was born. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 13. 1996, to compare the two is not to say that Carter – better known as the A$AP-fraternizing, “Magnolia”-hit-making Playboi Carti – is the best rapper in the world. No, Carti is, as the New York Times once noted, “more at ease with the performance of the role than with the actual act of rapping.” But, in the way that he draws in everything that floats around the genre in 2017 – the hedonism, the consumerism, the inevitable fashion hookups – and reduces it down to its most potent form, Carti epitomizes hip-hop right now, just as Shakur did its 90s golden age.

Just don’t dismiss him as only a rapper. When we meet in a London photography studio, Carti, doe-eyed and high cheekboned (his cheekbones are the only thing higher than him during this interview), is a walking contradiction. He’s the everyman artist out here to make money. The proud Atlantan who hopped on a bus to New York and never looked back. The kind of teenager who, he admits, could have, “been on some real ghetto shit,” but instead took a job at H&M. “I’ve never been the type to sit at home on my ass,” he states. He quit only when his local celebrity reached a point where he was being recognized folding tees. “I feel like I’m part of the new wave, the new sound, the new generation,” he says with unwavering conviction.

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