Playboi Carti is indeed a rockstar who could have joined Slayer.
On Wednesday night, Carti brought the Whole Lotta Red cut "Slay3r"—the first verse of which sees the recent Billboard 200 chart-topper shouting out the California thrash metal band—to Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. The performance thankfully sees Carti sticking with the fashion-show-meets-minimal-warehouse-club-show aesthetic of his recent New Year's Eve livestream.
Notably, the performance also gifts us all with the unique pleasure of imagining how the normies who have Tonight Show baked into their daily viewing ritual first reacted to it.
Carti's sophomore studio album fittingly dropped on Xmas Day of last year via Interscope and AWGE after years of well-built hype. While some were quick to hop aboard the knee-jerk reactions train, others (this writer included) praised the album for its thrilling vocal and structural experimentation, as well as its assortment of consistently experimentation-complementary production.
The WLR experience ultimately became Carti's first-ever No. 1 entry on the Billboard 200 albums chart, moving 100,000 equivalent album units in its first week.
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Sadly, the 24-track album (with a deluxe version still imminent) has been prevented from being taken on the road due to the ongoing pandemic. Whenever touring is safely possible again, however, it's easy (and comforting) to imagine the live aspect of the WLR era looking a lot like the Tonight Show performance in the video up top.
