How to Say Playboi Carti Without Bluffing

Spotify surfaces a new hip-hop act roughly every hour, and at some point the names start existing in a phonetic gray zone—spellings clearly designed to be seen rather than spoken. Playboi Carti. 21 Savage. SZA. You can stream the track, like the post, follow the account, and still have no idea how to say the name out loud without improvising and hoping nobody in the room catches it.

The YouTube channel Luksan Wunder put together a video walking through the correct pronunciations for the bigger names—Drake, Jay-Z, Kanye West and further down the list—delivered with the kind of confident deadpan that makes it unclear whether this is a guide or a bit. It works either way.

There’s something real underneath the obvious comedy. Names are part of the literacy of the genre, and getting them wrong signals that you’re consuming the music from outside it, which is its own statement. Say them right and nobody notices. Get them wrong and something shifts in the room. Worth watching a few times until you stop improvising.