Why Googling Playboi Carti's Baby Boi at 3 AM is a Parenting Mistake

There I was, balancing a dangerously lukewarm oat flat white on my knee at the Greenwich park swings, trying to pretend I still possessed a shred of cultural relevance. The dad pushing his toddler next to me—a bloke wearing immaculate vintage trainers that have definitely never been vomited on—casually mentioned he was aggressively refreshing Twitter waiting for the "carti baby boi" drop. I nodded sagely, stroking my chin with the exhausted gravitas of a man who hasn't slept a full night since 2021. I assumed, naturally, that he was talking about an incredibly exclusive, limited-edition drop of muted earth-tone muslin cloths, or perhaps a boutique line of organic Scandinavian sleep sacks.

I tucked that little nugget of information away, feeling quite smug about my insider knowledge. Later that night, while the twins were tag-teaming a phantom illness that strictly required my presence in the hallway from 2 AM to 4 AM, I pulled out my phone. I typed "playboi carti baby boi" into the search bar, fully expecting to drop fifty quid on a beige romper that would make my girls look like tiny, fashionable medieval peasants.

What I found instead wasn't a sustainable textile brand.

Wait, it's not a Swedish sleep sack?

It turns out that Playboi Carti is an incredibly famous hip-hop artist, and "Baby Boi" is his highly anticipated, incessantly delayed, unreleased album. The internet is absolutely saturated with teenagers and streetwear aficionados hunting for leaks of this record, which falls into a genre known as "rage rap." Rage rap, as I quickly discovered while sitting in the dark surrounded by scattered Duplo blocks, features aggressively blown-out bass, manic synthesizers, and lyrics that would make a seasoned sailor blush.

It's emphatically not a line of clothing for an actual baby.

This massive pop-culture misunderstanding sent me down a rather paranoid rabbit hole. Because before the twins arrived, I listened to loud music. I went to gigs. My Spotify Wrapped was an eclectic mix of indie rock and whatever hip-hop the algorithm decided I needed. Now, my most played track is "Brown Noise 10 Hours Seamless Loop," and I find myself terrified of exposing my children to anything louder than a moderate sneeze.

The decibel dilemma in the family Vauxhall

The temptation to play your own music when you're trapped in a car with a screaming infant is nearly overwhelming. There have been moments on the South Circular where I'd have gladly traded my left kidney to blast a bass-heavy track just to drown out the noise of twin teething agony. But during a routine weigh-in last year, our GP muttered something rather terrifying about infant ear canals.

My hazy understanding of his medical explanation is that a baby's ear canal is essentially a tiny, highly efficient echo chamber. Because their heads are so small, the sound pressure physically amplifies as it enters the ear. What sounds like a pleasantly robust bassline to an adult is basically acoustic warfare to a four-month-old. Our GP suggested that keeping environmental noise under 70 decibels is ideal, which I found deeply hilarious considering my girls routinely generate 110 decibels just fighting over a single rice cake.

But the warning stuck with me. You simply can't pump aggressive, blown-out rap music through the car stereo with a baby boi (or girl) strapped into the backseat, because you're slowly degrading their hearing while they sit there helplessly covered in their own drool.

Distractions that won't damage their hearing

So, if I can't deafen them with Playboi Carti to stop the crying, I've to resort to physical bribery. When the teething strikes and they become inconsolable little monsters, I rely heavily on shoving safe, silent objects into their mouths.

Honestly, my absolute lifeline has been the Malaysian Tapir Teether. I've no idea why Kianao chose an endangered Southeast Asian mammal for a baby toy, but it's a stroke of genius. It looks utterly bizarre—sort of like an anteater wearing a tuxedo—but the textured edges around the snout and the little heart cutout are magnificently designed. Last Tuesday, one of my daughters gnawed on this tapir with the ferocity of a starving wolf for forty-five solid minutes while we were on the Tube. It's thick enough to withstand serious molars, completely silent, and apparently fascinating to look at.

I also bought the Wood & Silicone Pacifier Clips, which are objectively fine. They look quite lovely with their muted, nature-inspired beads, and they do successfully stop the dummy from hitting the pavement. However, at two years old, my twins have figured out that if they detach the dummy, the clip itself makes an excellent medieval flail, which they use to whip each other in the shins when my back is turned. So, buy them for an infant, but beware the toddler years.

If you're looking for more ways to keep your children safely occupied without resorting to ear-splitting volumes, you can browse Kianao's full collection of sustainable baby goods.

The great echolalia incident

There's another, non-medical reason you shouldn't stream explicit rap music around your toddlers, and it has nothing to do with decibels. It has to do with the fact that toddlers are basically tiny, unhinged parrots.

My health visitor casually mentioned the word "echolalia" one afternoon, which is the clinical term for toddlers repeating every single sound they hear long before they've the cognitive ability to understand what it means. They just mimic the phonetics. I learned this the hard way when I briefly left a very explicit comedy podcast playing on the kitchen smart speaker, resulting in my daughter screaming a highly inappropriate phrase in the middle of the Waitrose bakery aisle.

I tried the whole "just wear one wireless headphone" trick for a while, but frankly, Bluetooth pods get swatted out of your ear and immediately eaten by the dog, so I abandoned that strategy entirely.

When I do need a moment of peace to listen to my own thoughts (or a podcast about a musician I used to be cool enough to know), I hand them something deeply millennial, like the Sushi Roll Teether. Yes, it's absurd to give a baby a piece of fake raw fish made of food-grade silicone. But the varied textures on the "rice" part of the teether are incredibly good at massaging swollen gums, and it distracts them long enough for me to drink that oat flat white before it goes completely cold.

Surviving the auditory wasteland

Parenting is mostly about grief, really. Specifically, grieving the loss of your own cultural relevance. You have to accept that your car stereo is now exclusively a vessel for white noise, nursery rhymes, and perhaps an audiobook read by a celebrity who desperately needs a tax write-off. Keep the volume at a level where you can still clearly hear yourself muttering profanities about the price of nappies, accept that you'll never be cool enough to anticipate a streetwear drop again, and politely nod when other dads talk about albums you've never heard of.

If you're currently dealing with a teething baby and a desperate need for silence, skip the loud music and explore Kianao's organic silicone teethers instead.

Highly specific questions from exhausted parents

Are those Kianao teethers actually safe to be chewed on for hours?

Yeah, unfortunately for my bank account, they're incredibly safe. They're made of food-grade silicone, which means they don't have BPA, PVC, or phthalates (which I couldn't spell without looking up). They don't splinter or harbor weird bacteria, provided you actually wash them once in a while instead of just wiping them on your trousers.

How do I know if my music is too loud for the baby?

My personal rule of thumb: if I've to raise my voice to tell my partner that we're completely out of baby wipes, the music is too loud. The NHS and various pediatric bodies seem to agree that anything over a normal conversation level (around 60-70 decibels) is pushing it for tiny developing ears in a confined space.

Can I just put noise-canceling headphones on my baby at a gig?

You can try. I bought a pair of those massive, adorable baby earmuffs for a summer festival. One twin tolerated them for exactly four minutes before ripping them off and hurling them into a crowd of people eating falafel. If you've a child who actually keeps things on their head, they're brilliant for protecting hearing. If you've my children, you just end up leaving the festival at 2 PM.

How do I clean the silicone tapir thing?

I chuck it in the dishwasher on the top rack when I'm feeling lazy, which is always. You can also boil it for a few minutes if it fell somewhere truly disgusting, like the floor of a London bus. It survives pretty much everything.

Will Playboi Carti ever release Baby Boi?

Honestly, I've absolutely no idea, but if it drops and the dad at the park mentions it again, I'm just going to pretend I bought the limited-edition vinyl. It's easier than explaining that I spent my evening writing about silicone sushi.