Happy Birthday to Playboi Carti 🥳 Before any of the music, Jordan Terrell Carter was a kid in Riverdale, Georgia who wanted to play basketball. He walked away from the team after falling out with his coach, joined the school choir, and started skipping class to record while working at H&M to cover the rest He started uploading to SoundCloud in 2011 under the name Sir Cartier, became Playboi Carti in 2013 and joined Atlanta’s Awful Records in 2014. At 18 he moved to New York to chase it full time, met A$AP Bari, and that introduction led him to A$AP Rocky and a deal with AWGE and Interscope in 2016 ‘Magnolia’ changed everything in 2017. The single hit number 29 on the Hot 100, his self titled mixtape opened at number 12 with almost all of it freestyled, an approach he picked up from Lil Wayne, and he landed on the XXL Freshman list that same year. ‘Die Lit’ followed in 2018 with no radio and no press and still landed at number three ‘Whole Lotta Red’ dropped on Christmas Day in 2020 and rap has not sounded the same since. Distortion where the melody used to sit, ad libs doing the work of a hook, and atmosphere carrying the rest. It debuted at number one with 100,000 first week, and almost six years later that formula runs through the entire underground and through everything his own label Opium has put out since Carti dropped ‘MUSIC’ in March 2025 and took the entire year. All 30 songs on it debuted on the Hot 100 in the same week, something no rapper had ever pulled off, it went number one with 300,000 first week and it closed out 2025 as the most streamed rap album on Spotify Today, Carti is a father to Onyx and Yves, has over 26 billion streams and influence that runs through an entire generation of rap. Opium has grown into one of the genre’s defining labels with stars of its own, and Carti spent this summer filling stadiums across Europe and taking everything he built to its biggest scale Happy Birthday to Carti who turns 30 today 📸: @sebastiennagy // @cactus.kish // @331des // @gunnerstahl.us // @deechmedia - @bars