How Playboi Carti and Clipping Are Channeling Rap Retrofuturism
The Atlanta rage-rap emissary and the experimental California trio both dropped albums that excavate the past to reimagine the present.
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.
