How Playboi Carti and Clipping Are Channeling Rap Retrofuturism

The retrofuturism movement raises a simple question: What if the gap between yesterday and tomorrow was smaller? Blurring the lines between eras is a way to create new worlds, fragments of time recontextualizing each other. Think of The Incredibles, Brad Bird’s 2004 animated superhero movie, which imagined a future of flying cars and laser beams done up in a ‘60s art-deco style, or artists like Stevie Wonder and Parliament-Funkadelic using the vocoder to give their voices a robotic edge. There’s an obfuscation of time at play that makes the demarcation of “past” or “future” irrelevant—in their respective contexts, they cancel each other out by remixing themselves.

As a genre, rap was designed to take advantage of this aesthetic in ways both obvious and subtle. Sampling is the most blatant example, with everyone from RZA to Juicy J to Cash Cobain using old songs to chart new musical paths, but that brand of homage is only the top layer. When Del The Funkee Homosapien recasts himself as a robotic drifter on a post-apocalyptic planet on Deltron 3030, or Lil Uzi Vert mixes early-aughts pop-punk with fast-paced contemporary Philly rap, those nostalgic pangs rub up against perpetual newness, making statements of their era that somehow transcend it. Two recent big-ticket albums—Playboi Carti’s Music and Clipping.’s Dead Channel Sky—attempt to thread the needle stitching reminiscence and innovation together, calling back to specific eras, scenes, and styles while furiously forging their own. 

Off rip, Carti was a child of several different rap schools. As early as his time with the Awful Records collective, the Atlanta rapper was bending the label’s post-post-snap music experiments to his whim, with even more emphasis on barked Jeezy-style verses and textural earworm hooks à la Young Thug. His 2017 breakout single “Magnolia,” which rigged that sensibility to Pi’erre Bourne’s glitchy Sega Saturn-sounding beat, played a crucial role in shaping the SoundCloud and rage rap eras; it also marked the point where Carti’s aesthetic stopped feeling earthbound, never mind bound to any regional style.

Die Lit, from 2018, and its 2020 followup Whole Lotta Red, went bigger and darker, channeling gothic overtones and hypnotic chants into mosh-pit screamers produced by a growing cabal of beatmakers including Bourne, Malay Raw, and F1lthy. In Carti’s world, a place run on throwback jerseys, combat boots, and endless song leaks, the leather-clad swagboi-by-RAWR XD theatrics are all-encompassing. Music, an album plagued by delays, domestic abuse allegations—not uncommon in the scene—and ginormagantuan fan expectations, is another severe pivot. Instead of the King Vamp cybergoth theme of Whole Lotta Red, and like several recent big rap albums before it, Music mixes present-day flavors into a light tribute to the mixtape culture of the late-aughts and early 2010s. Carti is a student of the early millennium, and Music often plays out like Charli XCX’s Brat if it were helmed by someone with 10,000 Southern rap mixtapes saved to their DatPiff. 

DJ Swamp Izzo, a mainstay on Atlanta mixtapes from Future, Young Thug, and others back in the day, yells an occasional beat tag or adlib just enough times across the album to piss off newcomers who don’t know their history. Many of the beats lean heavily on nostalgia, from the bouncy soul of “Fine Shit” and “Backd00r” to the Ashanti-sampling “Cocaine Noise” to the vintage trap of “Charge Dem Hoes A Fee.” Hearing Carti do his best Future impression on the latter—over a Wheezy and Southside beat that sounds like the duo trying to solve a Lex Luger sliding block puzzle—is a perfect example of Music’s delirious approach to blurring the temporal lines.

As you might expect from an album so wide-ranging, its length and sequencing are among its weaker points. At 30 songs and 76 minutes, Music is a sprawling experience like the older projects it’s fixing to emulate. Touchstones of that era—Lil Wayne mixtapes, Drama compilations, etc.—worked because of the found-elements approach (i.e. rapping over other’s beats wholesale) inherent to mixtapes from that period. Much of Music injects the polish and auteur-ish grip of Kanye West’s 2010s run into that casual vibe and can sometimes sound a bit too manufactured because of it. There’s an overflow of ideas, and for the first time in his career, Carti gets lost in the sea nearly as often as he commands it. It’s an imperfect and chaotic world Carti’s created, one as tainted by acts of abuse both dismissed and still pending as it is by his own ambitions. 

While Playboi Carti approaches retrofuturism with plenty of energy and a slightly shaky hand, the California trio Clipping. come at it with a much more explicit aim. Rapper and actor Daveed Diggs and producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson are no strangers to concepts—the group itself is a conceptual project. Clipping. was founded on the idea that Diggs would never use first-person perspectives or the word “nigga” in his bars, in an attempt to depersonify the writing by shifting the focus away from him. Mixed with Hutson and Snipes’s experimental and abrasive take on rap production, the group has spent the last decade charting rap’s fringes, spinning visceral hip-hop out of parts both metallic and grimy. Sometimes, it leads to engrossing stuff, like their Hugo Award-nominated sci-fi album Splendor & Misery or their punchy 2016 EP Wriggle. Other times, it produces ambitious but stilted work, like the 2019 horrorcore tribute There Existed An Addiction To Blood. 

Their latest project, Dead Channel Sky, pares things down more than ever. It’s still a project with a deliberate retrofuturist framework in mind, but one that wants to function as a loose mixtape offering “brief glimpses into a world rather than an overview of it,” according to the album’s Bandcamp bio. After a few bouts of full-length storytelling, this is their shot at a Black Mirror or Animatrix-style anthology series. Hutson and Snipes have come with beats that pull from different corners of rap, rave, techno, and punk, pairing well with the CCTV and bigotry-inspired resistance coursing through Diggs’s writing. 

Finding the middle ground between Bay Area electronic label Tigerbeat6 and rap pioneers like Rammellzee and Afrika Bambaataa with a cyberpunk twist is a very Clipping. idea, and much of Dead Channel Sky moves like you might expect. Beats glitch out and molt constantly, beginning with standard drum patterns but smash-cutting into feedback, dial tones, and mechanical sounds you should only ever hear on a malfunctioning submarine. “Dodger” starts with what I can only describe as the sound of a theremin being cooked in a microwave before 808s and hi-hats ramp up the speed. Diggs keeps pace with his patented triple-time rapping, weaving a story of the titular dissenter on a space station that quickly spirals into a treatise about revolting against the police state in the name of love: “If innocence is in your future/You’re either in the net/Or you against the wall/Either a protector or rejector/And rejectors won’t be tolerated.”

It’s a dazzling vignette packed into just over four minutes, but the overemphasis on speed and technique can make it difficult to follow. This is a problem that’s plagued Clipping. for some time now—the trio are masters of mood and technically sharp, but they often barrel through ideas too quickly and with a theater-kid earnestness that doesn’t quite fit any of the genres they’re clearly obsessed with. What made earlier work like their 2014 self-titled album or Visions of Bodies Being Burned special were the moments when the technique, mood, and adroit storytelling all worked in service of each other; Dead Channel Sky’s best songs are those that tap into that vibe. 

More successful are songs like “Mirrorshades pt. 2,” an old-fashioned house jam that depicts an intergalactic nightclub so exclusive that even God couldn’t get in without the right glasses. Here, Daveed’s role as narrator feels the most natural, setting the scene before the rappers Contra and Eboshi, of the duo Cartel Madras, take on the main action. The looseness Clipping. is looking for exists in these songs and in collaborations like “Welcome Home Warrior,” where Diggs and Aesop Rock go thesaurus for thesaurus while rapping about the pros and cons of digital escapism. Even if it becomes illegible sometimes—I’m still trying to make heads or tails of what “Polaroids” is about—Dead Channel Sky goes a long way toward constructing a world where futuristic wonders clash with present-day malaise.

Clipping. may be in this to tell stories in a more traditional sense, but Dead Channel Sky has much in common with Playboi Carti’s Music as pieces of hip-hop retrofuturism. Both are grand, sweeping projects dense with references to older works in their respective canons; both use those influences and forward-thinking philosophies to assert their place in the present. Carti channeling the spirits of Thug Motivation-era Jeezy and peak-mixtape Wayne into his rage-rap tapestry is as intricate a job as Clipping. reimagining the Bay Area as a dystopian cyberpunk playground. Both have their flaws, but when they click, they bridge the gap between the past and the present in ways bound to influence the future.