my Way

Before he would test hip-hop’s patience for repetition, turning ad-libs from an accent piece to the entire point of a song as one of the earliest benefactors of the Sound-Cloud rap phenomenon, Playboi Carti was a teenaged skateboarder in Atlanta, searching for the sort of poorly ventilated basements where, to the right music and with a cheap beer in hand, people would throw elbows. His stomping grounds used to be the Historic Fourth Ward Skatepark, where “I’d see a kid with a mohawk and be like, ‘I want a fucking mohawk,’” Carti recalls. “I’m 12 or 13, wanting gauges and shit.” And then, even though Fourth Ward was just five miles from his South Atlanta neighborhood, such suburban angst compelled Carti to report back on what he saw.

“I really went out of my way to get what I was on,” Carti says. “Where I’m from, everybody’s just hip to this and that, so