At the time, he got kinda lost in the shuffle of the billion other mumbling trap kids of the day, but he’s proven to be one of the more resilient figures of that scene. Lil Baby is one of the many thousands of rappers who emerged during the Soundcloud rap wave of 2018.
And with that, let’s talk about Lil Baby. Soundcloud rap absolutely confounded me when I first encountered it, and though I was later able to acclimate myself to the likes of 21 Savage and Playboi Carti, that hasn’t made me an effective barometer for pointing out the not new thing, ya feel? Most modern hip-hop escapes me, and I struggle to analyze it even on the best of days it often takes me about four or five listens before I can form a coherent opinion about an artist.īut there were some artists who I thought would be easy to analyze, mainly because their stuff seemed painfully, transparently awful from the very beginning. The fact that hip-hop has arisen as the most dominant form of music in our current era has only amplified this divide, since most rappers need to be understood in the context of their entire body of work.Īnd so a lot of my initial impressions of this current breed of rappers has been… mixed, to say the least. I mostly only pick selected songs from an artist and, as was common during the iPod era, I’d compile all those songs into a large, eclectic collection, sharing space with select tracks from other artists.īut that mode of listening has really not served me well in the streaming era, where the concept of pop stardom has been diluted and transformed into near-complete irrelevance and our previous singles-based mode of listening has been shunted in favor of the revival of the album as the dominant format.
I mean, I do listen to albums, but I rarely walk away having imbibed and internalized the entire thing. That’s affected the way I listen to music to some degree, because I am not an album listener by any means. Hell, even more artsy and ambitious stars like Lady Gaga aren’t completely immune to this, either I didn’t need to absorb the entirety of Born This Way to understand the animating spirit behind it. You can tell who Katy Perry is based on her big singles you can have a complete idea of the career arc and trajectory of Britney Spears without ever having to look through her albums. The thing about pop music is that most pop stars traditionally function as singles artists–their biggest hits were usually quite representative of who they were, and you didn’t really need to dig deeper to have an informed opinion on them. I don’t like forming opinions about entire artists based on shallow observations usually centered only on a surface-level look at their work, but with pop music it’s usually sufficed. I’ve been listening to and covering pop music for a long, long time. There are some artists that you just hate from the very beginning, usually based on one or more songs.
“People, people we are the same / No we’re not the same / ‘Cause we don’t know the game / What we need is awareness, we can’t get careless”
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