xperiment – cartunez

No one moment can be solely attributed to an artist’s rise, but I remember when it felt like everything suddenly fell into place for Ken Carson. Four summers ago, just a few weeks after his second album, X, came out, he turned a sidestage at Rolling Loud Miami into his little corner of the world. He galloped back and forth in his socks; he whipped his baby dreads and puffed his chest out; he rapped along to his songs for a few syllables at a time, leaving it to the crowd to fill in the gaps. But sometimes he’d just stop and stare blankly mid-song; his hoarse exclamations would soften into half-hearted groans. These rapid, abrupt shifts in energy made up the entire set, and it’s awkward to look back at now, yet I can’t remember a crowd I’ve been in that was as explosive. A year later, in 2023, he dropped one of the most exhilarating trap (or rage, or whatever the fuck) albums ever, and the rest is history.

But history keeps track of the blemishes, too. That same switch Ken Carson seems to flip on and off as he performs is doubly apparent on wax: xperiment, his recent, unadventurous follow-up to last year’s up-and-down More Chaos, sounds like it was recorded through uninterrupted stretches of that thousand-yard stare. Half-melodic breakup tracks (“wheredoistart”), lukewarm electrofodder (“wrist”), and collabs that simply exist off the strength of being collabs (“ghost” with Lil Uzi) take up the most space. His latest, cartunez, is a fun 13-track addendum to xperiment. It doesn’t abandon the formula that yielded those duds, but it injects some much-needed passion into the mix. Said formula has never really changed for Ken Carson: he finds sprightly electronics to build around, ensures the low end is fluid and violent, and uses his flows as a rhythmic buoy that can supplement—but hardly ever dictates—the direction of the music.

To say that Ken’s music is good because he’s a good rapper, or even a good performer, is like claiming burgers are great because of the bread. Like, yeah, you need the two buns, but man, you know what you’re really here for. The production and engineering is the meat and cheese, and on cartunez, there’s much more dynamism compared to its long-winded predecessor. I love the confetti cannon synths that turn “swag jack” into a demented carnival ride; the panicky trills and stuttering snares that makes “roxy reynolds” feel like New York drill from Saturn. The way lil88’s drum work on “9 bitches” could make a set of subwoofers twerk is damn near enough for me to tune out Ken’s dry Nine Vicious disses altogether.

Then again, engaging with Ken Carson’s voice as pure texture is what makes his best music so fun. He’s no longer inclined to perform real catharsis like he was on A Great Chaos, so on cartunez, you get the songs about money and clothes that hit, and the ones that don’t. You stick around for the rabid, gurgly vocal inflections (“Bread in, you can’t get a slice!”; “Damn, this hoe too bad/I’m coppin’ them diamonds, they put ’em on ice!”), and then duck for cover when bad punchlines start raining down (“I’m lookin’ for my powers/Sky High”). You can bust a move when the hooks circulate around a single word or phrase (I’m thinking of “scrape” and “50k”); shit, you might even laugh at a metaphor that actually works (“The stick got monkey nuts, I go bananas wit’ it.”) But the ceiling for songwriting is (still) as low as it gets for anything worth listening to.

If cartunez sticks out for anything else, it’s the acknowledgment of the sprawling rage-rap strata outside of Opium. With one hand, Ken Carson taps ApolloRed1 to throw middle school insults at Nine Vicious on “9 bitches.” It’s lines like “Boy, you sugar sweet/Honey tea,” and “That white bitch you got got a Megamind” that make me cringe and shake my head, but like I said, at least the beat is pressure. With his other hand, Ken passes an olive branch to OsamaSon after years of petty beef that was egged on by trolls and stans online. The blistering “vamp city” pairs them over the most abrasive 808s cartunez has to offer, with Osama’s snotty chirp proving to be a nice foil to Ken’s muddy monotone.

It can be difficult to gauge the quality of Ken Carson’s music because there’s such a gap between how it sounds in private and how it sounds live. In my headphones, the weakest points of cartunez (“rare creature,” “yvngvmp”) sound too much like years-old throwaways for me to get excited. But in concert, where decibels reach stratospheric heights and ambient transitions sound seraphic, the Ken Carson songs you love become transcendental and the ones you don’t are reborn. At his headline show at Barclays Center last week, I found myself in awe of a few xperiment deep cuts that weren’t hitting on shit just 24 hours prior when I played them at home.

There’s this clip of Ken from that Rolling Loud set a few years back that recirculates like every six months, and with good reason: He’s hopping and chirruping through the intro of “Freestyle 2,” creating so much tension in the build-up that the drop felt like the parting of the Red Sea. And I remember holding onto my phone for dear life in the pit with my other arm clung around my friend’s shoulder while the bass made the speakers shhhhhh like a smoke machine. That’s all I’m still left with: the reverberations that echoed, the whoops he let off in the mic, and the feeling that nothing else could be more exciting.