Almost Famous: Playboi Carti Talks His Come Up, First Mixtape, and Working With Lil Uzi Vert
But fandom is tricky, and can sometimes place people in compromising positions. Which is how Ian Connor, the fashion influencer and friend of ASAP and Kanye, comes up. In the hotel room, near the end of the video, after a jump cut, Carti says, “Only nigga that can kill me right now is Ian Connor. You know why he kill me? ‘Cause that’s my brother.”
The moment stings now, after multiple women came forward in 2016 to accuse the fashion influencer of rape. Connor worked closely with Carti, in a manager-type capacity earlier in Carti’s career; they appeared in interviews together, and in a three-way interview conducted in early 2016 with Carti, Bari, and Connor, Connor talks about Carti’s music in the first-person plural. At one point Connor reminds Carti that Carti did in fact have sex while on tour in Japan (“You cracked two; you fucked a bitch at your show”), and that Roy Woods is supposed to be on his upcoming tape. “We take time with this project, though,” Connor adds. “Carti’s music gonna live through us—we his lyrics.”
The allegations against Connor haven’t forced his friends in the rap world to cut ties with him. (Rocky called him his little brother in an interview in January of this year. “Fuck what the world gotta say,” he added.) It’s partly a result of the bonds between these men; when they call each other brother, they mean it. Family ties, and ties of fandom that often aspire to blood—these relationships are flexible, and often times fundamental to a person’s worldview, in such a way that they can accommodate some truly scary shit.
When I bring up Connor, the mood in the room changes, like when you’re a kid hanging out at a friend’s house, and you both notice that the parents downstairs have suddenly gone quiet in an effort to listen in.
Does he still work with Ian? “I don’t talk to him. I just keep to myself. He ASAP. It’s ASAP, you know what I’m saying? But I just keep to myself and try to build and learn all that shit by myself.”
But weren’t they close? “Yeah. It’s just niggas grow up, you know what I’m saying? Carti fans know what’s up. Niggas gotta grow up. Everything that we did is classic. Stay a classic. Just keep it like that. You feel me?”
It didn’t have anything to do with the rape allegations? “I don’t know nothing about that.”
A member of his team asks that I move on. After a pause, Carti picks the thread back up, unprompted.
“All I know is Playboi Carti got the hoes,” he says, then laughs. “That’s it. I love women to death. I feel like I do this shit for women. Because if the girls like you, you don’t have to give a fuck about what guys think. Why would you give a fuck about what guys think if you got a hundred girls calling your phone every day?”
