Even the most unemployed Opium acolyte would have difficulty parsing the layers of context that surround Playboi Carti’s latest surprise music video: a manic, self-sampling collaboration with YoungBoy Never Broke Again paired set to a montage of blurred iPhone self-shots, Impact-font sloganeering, and a strobing, thumbnail-sized image of YB. The track initially surfaced on Kanye West’s Instagram account as a Ye/Youngboy crossover on Wednesday evening as an apparent promotion for the disgraced mogul’s upcoming YZY SZN 10 fashion line, mere hours before Carti’s version would appear on his finsta, jeeringly captioned “DIS MY SONG LIL BRA @ye.”
No matter which of the two feuding prestige-rap auteurs recorded their version of “ALIVE” first, the Opium label boss has staked a decisive claim over the song, which already sampled a barked-out Swamp Izzo ad-lib from MUSIC standout “Crank” to begin with. Hopping on a F1LTHY-produced beat that fuses his recent taste for industrial trap cut-ups with the bass-led minimalism of “New Slaves,” Carti moans, croaks, and snarls through a series of opulent flexes. Black Chrome Hearts belts recall karate classes. His maids have maids of their own. He’s too geeked to even finish his verse properly, instead signing off with an ecstatic yawp.
Youngboy, who is enough of a Carti fan in his own right to have dropped a full album of Whole Lotta Red-inspired rage music in 2023, sounds equally amped, opening his verse with a “CARNIVAL” interpolation and YZY product placement (lending credibility to the theory that this was, in fact, Ye’s song first) before launching into a breathless shit-popping session, chaining triplet flows and Autotuned wails as he celebrates his newfound freedom from federal prison. It’s among the most unhinged work to date from two rappers who’ve already built cults around their hyperactive subversion: a veritable supervillain team-up. If the track really did belong to Ye to begin with, then that just makes Carti’s remix even more diabolical.
Listen to the song here.