Playboi Carti’s Merch Conundrum
Christmas Day saw the release of Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red, and it only took the world nearly ending for us to get it. There’s been plenty of discourse over whether or not the album was actually any good — personally I think that any large body of work such as an album or runway show needs time to breath, and so reviewing something the same weekend it releases is premature — but one thing that is absolutely certain is how abhorrent the accompanying merch was.
What really gets me is that both Kanye West and Matthew Williams executive produced WLR, two world class fashion minds, and we still ended up with a screen printed adobe stock cat photo. Now I get that maybe Kanye was busy warding off the devil from this satanic drop, but what’s the point of having Matthew Williams involved if the merch isn’t even gonna slap?
Album merch that seeks to stand alone (ie. separate from just a traditional album cover/tour promo shirt/sweatshirt, and at a larger scale) is most successful when it seems like something the artist would genuinely wear, and thus by buying the merch, you’re buying into their aesthetic. Look at the Astroworld merch; the tie dye shirts and western graphics all looked like things on those Travis Scott fit watch instagram accounts, and all of it felt like an important part of the Astroworld album rollout. He teased it for months, constantly popping up in Astroworld merch while simultaneously teasing the album, making the two almost inseparable. Carti could’ve easily had his own version of that. Imagine all those times he was popping up on the Alyx feed it was to hint at his own collection within the label that released alongside the album. Would avant garde suiting make good album merch? Most likely not in a traditional sense, but maybe in a different sort of promotional way.
The scale and depth of Carti’s product offering — which has 15 t-shirts, five hoodies, a denim jacket, ashtray, skateboard, vampire fangs and my personal favorite, a double cup candle (which is tobacco scented, for some reason) — suggests a real attempt at standalone merch. He’s spent the past two years since Die Lit nailing down his post-Soundcloud look and is without a doubt one of the best dressed rappers. He’s the first person you think of when you picture Alyx, and maybe Givenchy now too. His image may have been too entangled with high fashion anyways for merch to really work (Carti is really best known for leather pants and the Alyx chest rig, which is admittedly a lot harder to sell to people than t-shirts), which is also why I don’t think we’ve really seen Future or Lil Uzi Vert have successful merch drops either.
Still, it’s not helped by the fact that this merch is abhorrent. This shit looks like we held a gun to the head of the artistic director of Slint’s album covers and forced him to make merch for Hot Topic on an Adobe Illustrator bootleg, then blinded him anyways, like how they blinded the creator of the St. Basil’s cathedral for making something so beautiful, except the exact opposite of that. Oddly, purchasing a t-shirt doesn’t automatically include a digital download of WLR, so Carti isn’t even doing this to beef his Billboard numbers, he just believes in it that much.
If we’re searching for positives, though, at least we didn’t get one of those VLONE album release drops.