Ken Carson live: going gonzo in the great chaos

Photos and video by Caden Clinton

It started as a kind of half-joke. "Lol what if I went to see Ken Carson?" I'd been listening to the Atlanta rapper's 2023 album, A Great Chaos, pretty regularly since it dropped last October, but that frequency bumped up to Mildly Concerning proportions this past August when my interest suddenly spiked. Since then, I've listened to A Great Chaos almost every day. In a recent Endless Scroll podcast episode where we selected our 10 favorite albums of the 2020s thus far, I ranked A Great Chaos at No. 2, just one slot below Whole Lotta Red by Playboi Carti, the Atlanta visionary who signed Carson and remains the foremost influence on his younger protégé's rage-rap sound.

I love Whole Lotta Red so much that I spent two years trying to chase its high by mainlining Yeat, a white rapper from Oregon who became uber-famous for mastering a convincing ripoff of Playboi Carti's zeitgeist-shifting sound; hypnotic beats with laser-beam synths and overblown 808s, and electrified vocals that draw equally from Young Thug's soulful scats, Future's slurred croons, and Chief Keef's feral growls. Before A Great Chaos, Carson was, like Yeat, roundly dismissed by critics for doing a similarly lite variant of WLR. That all changed with A Great Chaos, in which Carson finally developed his own contrast to Carti; injecting goofy levity and emo melodrama over beats that are more playful than sinister, and honing a vocal delivery that's more casually melodic than it is misanthropically caustic. A Great Chaos is so deliriously fun that Carson has now entirely supplanted Yeat in my listening rotation.

Even so, I wasn't sure if I wanted to see Carson live. As a near-30-year-old, I knew I'd be one of the oldest people in his zoomery crowd, and I'd never seen anyone online describe him as a must-see live act. However, when I posed the offer to my friend Caden Clinton, my only IRL pal who likes Carson even a little bit, his immediate excitement got me amped. We decided we were going to use the show, which went down October 22nd at Pittsburgh's Stage AE, as an excuse to go gonzo mode and document an experience most people in our age group don't give two fucks about. Roughly a month before the gig, we heard from one of the lead production managers at Stage AE that the venue's staff were already dreading the Ken Carson show. They had received emails from promoters earlier on in the tour telling them horror stories about the rowdy fans, and warning them to batten down the hatches with more cops and security than they'd typically deem necessary. Hearing that Carson's crowds were allegedly abnormally unruly made Caden and I twice as excited for the gig than we already were.

We arrived at the venue an hour before doors opened, and there was already palpable tension in the air. An ambient weed smell lingered in the parking lot behind Carson's tour bus, and a long line of fans was already circling the block. Half-a-dozen merch bootleggers rounded the building like vultures, hawking semi-convincing tour tees for half the price of the ones inside. The people in line couldn't have cared less. All of them were dressed in black and the median age looked to be about 17. Most, but my no means all, of the audience was white. Compared to the $uicideboy$ show I saw at the same venue a few years earlier, the Ken Carson crowd was more racially diverse, but the $uicideboy$ drew a more varied range of ages, everyone from mid-twenties Soundcloud veterans to young teens. Ken Carson's audience was almost uniformly teenagers. I didn't spot a single person drinking a beer all night, and I got doused with red Gatorade, not vodka soda, in one of the evening's raucous pits.

The fact that the crowd was hopped-up on adolescent hormones, not alcohol, might've made them more unpredictable. The minute the clock struck 7 p.m. (the time doors opened), a throng of restless kids began rattling the fence outside the venue and tried climbing trees to scale over and enter the grounds – where Carson wouldn't be taking the stage for nearly three hours. Once we got through the gates, we bumped into the venue manager who was visibly stressed, telling us with an exasperated tone that he'll be happy when the night's over. Another security guard told us that they had more security on-site than at any prior show he'd ever worked at Stage AE – roughly 40 guards compared to the average 20 or 30.

Before the first of two warm-up DJ's even took the stage, there were already thousands of teens swarmed into the pit, which had the kinetic volatility of an active beehive; this magical orb of buzzing energy that, if perturbed, could wreak utter havoc on everything around it. At a couple points I heard loud jeers emanating from the center of the congregation, but even as I stretched to my tip-toes and strained my eyes, all I could see was the amber glow of phone lights surrounding the scrum, appearing like a burble of glowing lava peering out from beneath the molten crust of black tees. It felt certain that the whole thing would ignite into a volcanic blaze at any moment.

I braced myself for flames when the first DJ – a dorky looking white millennial who was obviously not Ken Carson – took the stage to rapturous cheers, and one teen bolted past me screaming, "Ken's coming out right now!" Mosh pits opened up and crowdsurfers ascended shoulders while a smorgasbord of 2020s rap hits boomed from the monitors. Playboi Carti dominated the playlist, and whenever F1lthy's "wake up, F1lthy" beat tag sounded out, it triggered a pavlovian response that made the whole mass shriek and lurch forward. When a golden oldie from the 2010s came on, whether Chief Keef's "I Don't Like" or xxxtentacion's "Look At Me," they got the response that "Don't Stop Believing" does at a wedding reception. However, the millennial/zoomer generation gap couldn't have been illustrated in starker terms than when Future's "Type Shit" was met with shrugging silence, but the very next song, Travis Scott's "FE!N," turned the venue into a popcorn machine.

Ironically, the most explosive moment of the night didn't happen during Carson's performance. It was toward the end of the first DJ's set, when the pit was still only at 75% capacity, and a crescent of bug-eyed teens was forming around the surrounding barricade while a few isolated security guards stood with their arms out and palms wide like crossing guards. They didn't stand a chance, and the trigger to the stampede was Nettspend's "Nothing like Uuu," which had the aural effect of a bull fighting muleta, coaxing the mob over the railing and into the concrete pit, filling out the perimeter until some kids were so squished that they climbed back over the railing to escape. One tween who looked no older than 13, but told me he was 15, tapped my shoulder and nervously asked if he would be crushed if he stood toward the back for Carson's set. He and his friends had been camping out at the venue since 9 a.m., but he was wary of joining them upfront and getting smushed by all the bigger high-schoolers. I guess I must've given off a wisened aura because he seemed satisfied with my reassurance that he'd be safe and sound chilling in the back.

It's not an exaggeration to say that Caden and I were the oldest non-parents in the crowd. Even trippier was that the parents who were in attendance were closer to my age than the children they were supervising. At one point I stood next to a mom in the VIP section who was serving an arms-crossed chaperone pose while her middle-school-age sons pogoed giddily at the railing's edge. She couldn't have been more than five years my senior, and when she glanced to her right and clocked me mouthing every word to Carson's song, her bored demeanor changed and she began nodding her head in approval with her eyes zeroing in on the stage, as if a fellow millennial's enjoyment gave her the go-ahead to see Carson as more than just her pre-pubescent kid's current fave.

Once the second DJ exited and Carson's arrival became imminent, Caden and I bolted up to the front of the stage so he could take photos and I could observe. We were stationed in the no-mans land between the barricade and the stage where only security and photographers are allowed. A veteran cameraman recounted a horror story where an overexcited crowd, not unlike the one behind us, broke down the barricade and trapped him under the busted metal, nearly breaking his ankle until a fast-acting security guard whisked him away. I gulped and surveyed the faces at the front of the barricade. The teens' mouths looked frothy and their eyes feral as their attention was glued to the corner of the curtain where Carson would soon emerge from. When the lights dimmed and Carson's intro music started, one teenage girl shrieked, "Ken!" and jolted up and down like she was possessed. When Carson scaled to the top of the two-story metal scaffolding that functioned as his entire spartan production, he snarled a couple of his signature, "what the fuck?!"'s, and the crowd repeated the phrase back like a religious mantra.

Luckily, the barricade held strong as the whole room bellowed the frenetic hook of "Hardcore" and the bass consumed my body like a torrential downpour of rage rain. After snapping photos of Carson's set for the three songs we were allotted, we surveyed the the landscape from the VIP section and then decided to infiltrate the horde. We easily slipped through a dozen rows of fans and posted up near a mosh pit on the left side that expanded and contracted with each song like a sea anemone. There were at least three or four pits going during every song, and all of them contained more communal jumping than aggro slamming. The moshing was innocent and wholesome compared to the average metal or hardcore pit, and far classier than the fratboy push pits I used to see at dubstep shows in the early 2010s, where normies co-opted the ferocity of metal mosh pits but without any of the tradition's pick-your-friend-up-when-they-fall etiquette. The Ken Carson moshers were gentler than that, maybe because most of them were sober, or maybe because moshing is so commonplace in the post-Travis Scott era that today's kids are more attuned to how it should be done.

Like many modern MCs, Carson only rapped every fifth word of his songs. He was mostly there to provide snarling ad-libs and fire off stray "what the fuck!"'s while his album recordings rolled mechanically through the setlist. He mostly remained perched atop the scaffolding where his small frame was obscured by shadows and strobe flashes. On two occasions, Carson climbed precariously down the ladder and mugged for the fans up front, taking one fan's phone and snapping a selfie before tossing it back like a hot potato. His lack of raw showmanship didn't seem to matter to his fans, who were so consumed by the songs and the physical experience of being a sentient blob that what Carson said or did had little effect on their rousing enjoyment.

In less than an hour, Carson zoomed through almost every song on A Great Chaos and visited the requisite highlights from his earlier work (chiefly 2020's "Yale," his most popular song). However, it was the 2024 A Great Chaos deluxe edition tracks that got the nuttiest response of anything the whole night, which demonstrates how much momentum Carson has behind him right this very second.

"ss," short for Sydney Sweeney, has militaristic bass and villainous orchestral synths that were easy chum for the mosh sharks. And its hook, "I was fuckin on your bitch in my Rick Owens socks," is as deliriously quotable as my generation's designer footwear-during-coitus refrain, Future's "I just fucked your bitch in some Gucci flip-flops." An even bigger detonation arrived during "Overseas," Carson's April single that already has more streams than almost any other song on A Great Chaos. It's a mortal lock for my favorite song of the year, and I felt a dual flush of embarrassment and pride as I rapped every word while pressed between two 16-year-old bros with zoomer fades.

Caden and I got separated in the surf somewhere between "Me N My Kup" and "Jennifer's Body," so once A Great Chaos's stormy thesis track, "Fighting My Demons," concluded, I paddled through the crowd and pulled myself up over the VIP railing to escape the current. I yanked up the sleeves of my sweat-soaked undershirt and patted my pockets to make sure my phone and wallet were still intact. Carson was closing the show with "free young thug," an unreleased leak dating back to 2022 that most of the crowd knew just as well as any of his other streaming-sanctioned bangers. As soon as the track ended Carson walked off, the house music came on, and stage hands began swiftly deconstructing the scaffolding. There was no encore.

As the kids slowly trekked out of the venue, I spoke with one of the lead security guards who seemed relieved that the crowd wasn't as unmanageable as they anticipated. Maybe if Nettspend had been playing it would've gone differently. After the merch line thinned, I went up and spent more than I'd like to admit on a t-shirt with illegible text that looks like a deathcore band logo crossed with Machine Girl album art. I'm sure if I wore it to any suburban high-school in the Pittsburgh region I'd look like a teacher dressing like his own students for Halloween.

As we exited the venue and traipsed down the sidewalk, a gaggle of kids were hunched conspicuously near the back lot where Carson's tour bus was parked. One of them was holding a white guitar, and Caden wondered whether he was aiming to try and get Carson to sign it. My head felt frazzled from the whole experience: the nail-biting anticipation that something bad might happen, the second-hand thrill of watching kids lose their mind to Carson, and the budding soreness in my throat from yelling back every word to "Me N My Kup" and "Overseas." I pulled out my phone to recalibrate my senses and see what I missed while escaping reality for a few hours in ragedom. My phone had evidently gotten unlocked in my pocket and the fabric of my pants typed a bunch of gibberish into my notes app:

Ml p
0
Llplppp
LLpplpplpplmlppp0l0lpppppp pplpllpplpo

Moshpit morse code? A great chaos, indeed.