Playboi Carti Created Barely Controlled Chaos At Rolling Loud 2025

Midway through Playboi Carti’s raucous, utterly unhinged headlining set at Rolling Loud California, the music cut out, and a voice boomed, “Everybody, take three steps back!”

It isn’t entirely surprising that a crowd control situation unfolded during the unrestrained set. But it’s kind of telling that the reason for the set stopping — a few fans passed out in the front row — was revealed via a live stream from Kai Cenat, who was onstage with Carti while all this was happening.

This is the era we live in now; we’re livestreaming events from the stage that are being streamed by the festival itself, while practically the entire crowd also streams. We’re in the information overload era, and Playboi Carti is the perfect artist for the moment.

If you felt overstimulated during Carti’s set, which featured flamethrowers periodically going off, strobe lights, smoke machines, lasers, and seemingly as many people on the stage as there were in the crowd, congratulations: You’re old enough to remember a world before we had screens in our pockets, screens on our laps, screens on our desks, and screens on our walls, all going at the same time, and all showing us different things.

But for Carti’s audience, this is all just par for the course; at any given moment, there are about a half dozen global disasters, at least a handful of local ones, and more than one persistent personal problem vying for their attention at the same time, all a notification, a finger swipe, a DM, or an algorithmic update away. All. The. Time.

No wonder they just want to rage.

The reason Carti captures the imagination, the reason he’s the go-to features artist despite the artists who request his presence not even knowing what he’s saying in his verses (if you can call his utterances “verses” in the technical sense), is he knows how to harness all this chaos — and he understands that the only way to speak to it is with disruptive, expressionist performances like this one.

Maybe the only way to cut through all the noise is to be noisier than everything demanding our attention. To overload your senses with stimuli, to the point you have to seek him out in the maelstrom just to have a singular point of focus. It certainly seems to have helped the reception to Carti’s new album Music, which he finally released after months of delays, seemingly on a whim. His Rolling Loud set was its official live debut.

Full disclosure: I caught the set from the comfort of my couch via the official Rolling Loud livestream on TV, with the volume turned down as low as I could get it and still hear. I’m about 75% convinced something in my body would have given out entirely if I’d witnessed all this live, overwhelmed by the lights and music and people on stage (I saw Kai, and Chow Lee, and the rest of Carti’s Opium crew, and Rolling Loud co-founder Tariq, and I think Nettspend, and a dozen others who are all moving around too much to keep track of). The Weeknd even popped out for a bit to sing along(?) to the two artists’ collaboration “Timeless.”

I get it: I’m Batman, these new kids are Bane. I knew a world before the unhinged world of YouTube and SoundCloud and a half-dozen video apps and Find My Phone and daily “look at me” governmental chaos. Carti’s for those who were born into this bedlam. They’ve got the requisite tools — or maybe they lack them — to be able to process all this and find something to relate to within it.

It’s a primal scream for a world in which nothing much we do seems like it’ll make an impact — and honestly, I’m as impressed by Playboi Carti as I am a little scared of him and his followers. He’s hit a specific note, found an aggressive channel that can actually cut through and leave a lasting impression. He makes the music of the moment. It’s Carti’s world. We’re all just residents.