Lil Baby makes motivational music about getting money and cutting people off. The shining star of Atlanta record label Quality Control Music — the venture from longtime industry players Kevin “Coach K†Lee and Pierre “Pee†Thomas, whose success stories include the Migos, City Girls, and Lil Yachty — joined the fold as a hustler looking to readjust his trajectory after a string of arrests led to a two-year incarceration in the mid-2010s. He’d had no real interest in being a rapper — “He was fucking up millions of dollars before he made one song,†Young Thug excitedly notes during the new Amazon Prime documentary Untrapped: The Story of Lil Baby — but street smarts and local notoriety made him a natural, a writer uniquely in tune with the trust issues and insecurities that power a mainstream hip-hop hit. Baby’s breakthrough, the snide 2017 single “My Dawg,†was enticingly insouciant, a song about going out and having a great night with your friends while knowing there are people in the periphery who are only there because they view you as a conduit for their own success. Early gems like “9to5†(“I hear ’em screaming they down to ride / When it’s time to slide they ain’t with itâ€) and “Grindin†established a relatable style and accessible, melodic flow, positioning Baby as a power player too preoccupied with business to entertain a small fry, a guy you didn’t even approach unless you had fantastic reasons. This all caught the attention of successful hitmakers like Nicki Minaj, Drake, Ye, and Travis Scott, whose singles are just as much of an influence on the early Baby tapes as anything from ATL heavyweights like Young Thug and Gucci Mane. His verses deliver not just airtight hooks and bars but that stripe of world-weary authenticity. Knowing exactly how much this is worth to his millionaire industry peers, he now charges 300 grand for features. Hits like “We Paid†and “Sum 2 Prove,†both off Baby’s 2020 multiplatinum certified full length My Turn, perfected a formula of pained lyrics, mournful melodies, spitfire flows, and ominous pianos, while the socially conscious Space Jam: A New Legacy soundtrack gospel-rap song “We Win†and the protest anthem “The Bigger Picture†offered glimpses at the versatility this artist pushes to the margins while he rattles off bittersweet trap anthems.
Lil Baby’s chart reign dovetails with a precarious moment for Atlanta hip-hop, as local political leadership and law enforcement seek to portray the culture as a network of criminal enterprises. Gunna — Lil Baby’s longtime partner in rhyme and co-star of 2018’s Drip Harder mixtape — and Thug are both in jail awaiting trial on RICO charges insinuating that their Young Stoner Life label is a front for a drug and gun operation. Gucci Mane’s artist Pooh Shiesty is serving five years after pleading guilty in January to a federal firearm conspiracy charge stemming from a 2020 shooting. The same year, Lil Baby lost his best friend Marlo to gun violence; last year, he was arrested for marijuana possession in Paris. Like Lil Durk, his partner on last June’s tandem album The Voice of the Heroes, Baby is trying to apply the wisdom he picked up growing up in the shadow of gang violence to the music business, all the while building careers so other artists can see his success, making art about street life without drawing the wrong kind of attention to themselves. “I’m an artist and a businessman,†Lil Baby proclaimed on The Breakfast Club this month. “That’s it.†Documents from the YSL case reveal just how closely Atlanta rappers are being watched, how many years before the first hit album a young performer might be getting trailed by the police. Baby faces unique and mounting pressures as he dominates rap charts, performs in arenas, and runs his record label, 4 Pockets Full, while raising two children. So he hasn’t made too many drastic changes to the product. It’s Only Me, his third solo album, leans into the sound of “We Paid,†offering a collection full of variations on the gruff lyrics and morose piano notes of the 2020 hit that showcase impressive penmanship and vocal control but also a reluctance to escape the pattern of stress raps and disrespectful braggadocio that minted him as the most streamed artist of the year My Turn and two Taylor Swift albums came out.
“I talk about stuff I know everybody go through,†Baby explained while discussing his songwriting process on The Breakfast Club. His primary concern for a project is “that it do well.†It’s Only Me reinforces the point. The songs touch on the unique experience of being sought after and gossiped about, but they’re never so specific to the circumstances of the artist’s life as a rapper that a listener can’t relate. “Stand on It†flaunts wealth and inaccessibility — “Here we go again / Big body Benz / Cut off all my friends†— but roots it in an acknowledgement of the rapper’s rough beginnings: “Go and ask the streets about lil’ Dominique, I been a beast / Really got my name from shooting dice and selling niggas weed.†He’s great at expounding on downsides to the luxuries he flaunts in his songs, at making being hard to reach feel surprisingly lonely. (This makes Baby a great foil for Drake on tracks like 2018’s memorable “Yes Indeed†and this year’s DJ Khaled single “Staying Alive,†cobwebs on the latter song’s hook notwithstanding. They make it sound like getting money isn’t as fun as everyone suspects it is, like they’re a bit bored of even that.) The single “In a Minute†is a tour of exquisite expenditures peppered with tips for keeping your money secure: “Condo to get off, I was always taught don’t tell hoes where you stay at / Keep a stash house, you can’t take nothing to the spot where you lay at.†The paranoia’s relatable. Everyone has haters. “California Breeze,†an early album highlight, romances a woman in Rolls-Royce whips and trips to Malibu, but the meat of the song is about being real with people in your life. If you need it to be a love song, that’s in there; if you need it to be a song about feeling betrayed by friends, that’s in there, too.
This slipperiness can be a curse sometimes. Lil Baby feels like a pivotal figure because he is a kind of rapper they don’t make as much anymore: a great performer who also seems like a private person. It’s wild that he agreed to do a documentary, but he’s sure to note that it only told the bones of the story we’ll likely never hear the full extent of. He’s not a social-media power user like his labelmates, the City Girls. What you don’t hear in a song, you may never know. What you do is hard enough to make you admire the artist but vague enough to stay a step away from hip-hop cops. These were hallmarks of ’90s rappers, the passing-to-nonexistent interest in being truly known, the piping up only for shit you’re contractually obligated to be involved in, the letting the records do the talking. Lil Baby sells a very savvy, chameleonic mixture of modern styles from across the country that’s smooth enough to land with pop fans who only really pay attention to the melodies in hip-hop songs and reserved enough to fly with older heads who resent the younger generation’s predilection toward oversharing. It’s Only Me walks that line almost too well. The best songs — like “Perfect Timing,†which name-checks the rapper’s first mixtape and succinctly expresses the jarring change in his life in a few lines: “Tom Ford jacket, bell bottoms, ain’t going to prom though / Marble countertops to these floors, I’m from the slums, ho†— tap into the classic hero’s journey as we follow Lil Baby from unassuming childhood through the cunning come-up to the joys and dangers of public notoriety, and the rapper feels like Thor laughing through a story about a success only he could have pulled off. (Like the Avenger, Baby does great work in teams: On songs with Future, Thug, Shiesty, and Nardo Wick, he matches his guests’ deliveries so well it’s possible to forget who’s who.) The stuff between the best songs feels generic, so locked into a successful formula that it loses its personality.
On “Forever,†“FR,†and “Waterfall Flow,†the writing gets labored, and the hooks get predictable, and the beats tiptoe into those spectral, moody pockets you normally hear on Drake albums. You can tell It’s Only Me is a tricky balancing act whenever it doesn’t work, and it feels like Lil Baby is pitching songs for you to relate to in lieu of relaying his own story. In the shadow of the first album’s breakout success, the artist followed his Quality Control peers in pivoting to overloaded projects where spirited but machinelike filler breaks up the flow between the better songs. Migos followed the concise, comedic Culture with the labyrinthine Culture II, a meandering album that runs longer than most Pixar movies. Lil Yachty followed the bubbly Lil Boat mixtape with the bulky studio album Teenage Emotions. Every Lil Baby release runs a little longer than the last one, and It’s Only Me does not break the cycle. Listening to the new album in full, you notice how imperceptibly it slides from incredible to pedestrian songs, and where else in the catalogue the shaky song’s concept came out better. It’s Only Me’s “Forever†might be Lil Baby’s third best “Forever,†behind “Money Forever†with Gunna, off 2017’s Too Hard, and “Forever†with Lil Wayne, from My Turn. (It might even be the fourth: Mariah the Scientist’s “Always n Forever†is sturdy.) Try as he might, he hasn’t come up with a more chaotic sex rap than the time he said “Fifty-five hundred for a new pair of titties, I’ll buy ’em like Jordans†on “First Class,†off his 2018 debut studio album Harder Than Ever. “Waterfall Flow†goes for it anyhow — “You can tell me all your flaws / I’ll get someone to fix your body†— as did Too Hard’s “Freestyle†and Harder’s “Life Goes On.†On “Danger†and “Pop Out,†he fusses about Google getting his net worth wrong. Asked on Breakfast Club about dissing DJ Akademiks twice on It’s Only Me, Baby didn’t realize he gave the streamer all that time. You know the album is too long when the jokes start repeating.
It’s the mark of an incredible run that only five years out from the first music most people heard from him, Lil Baby finds himself at the same crossroads as mainstream artists with years more experience: making great songs but crowding them with less remarkable ones that play around with popular trends rather than pushing them. He didn’t need to take 23 songs to get to the point this time; he felt like two years is a long time between solo projects. He’s successful enough to take chances; he understands his appeal too well to stray from the script. What makes the album drag will be the same quality that makes it successful: Lil Baby knows what you expect from him, and It’s Only Me is a big buffet of what the people want. That’s it.