Despite a musical output that could rightly be classified as a flood over the last three years, until somewhat recently, Lil Baby was a rapper who wasn’t comfortable calling himself one.
“I went from telling people I ain’t a rapper to telling people this my life,” he said in a video interview this week from Atlanta, the city—a hyper-vibrant hip-hop landscape—where he grew up and made his name.
“Probably the last year and a half,” he continued. “I had to make myself stop saying, ‘You ain’t a rapper.’ I started saying I’m a rapper.”
Since 2017, Lil Baby has released nine albums or mixtapes. His 2020 album My Turn marked both a return from his version of a break—14 months without a full-length release, though his features on other artists’ songs never seemed to end—and a new crescendo in a still-young career. It remains the only album to go double platinum this year, and it entrenched his standing as one of rap’s foremost voices who burrows sharp lyrics in lilting melodic pockets. All but omnipresent on radio stations and streaming playlists, he’s strung together a growing list of unflinching and infectious hits.
Over the course of the call, Lil Baby was animated and expansive as he reflected on his career to date, displaying plenty of the easy charm that might be what convinced the Quality Control label executives Pierre Thomas and Kevin Lee—better known in their work at the Atlanta powerhouse as Pee and Coach K—to encourage him to pursue a music career when they knew him from around the city as a teenager. At the time, Lil Baby hadn’t yet started rapping, but by now his arc from ambivalence to full-fledged stardom has been told many times over. When he was released from prison in 2016, after serving two years on drug and weapon charges, he agreed to sign on to Pee and Coach’s plan and began learning from the rapper Young Thug, an old high-school classmate.
Now 25, Lil Baby seemed at ease with his position. In front of a backdrop of logos for 4PF, his own record label, he considered his role as a kind of elder statesman who, until relatively recently, had been studying under his own mentors.
“To me, I been saying the same stuff since my first mixtape,” Lil Baby said. “It’s just I put it together more, I got a little more confidence and I know people are kind of OK with it, so I don’t gotta question myself. And it got to a level where I could be me in the studio.”
As protests against racism and police brutality swept the country in June, Lil Baby issued a striking example of that self-assurance. He had been marching in Atlanta—“I have to be a part of it,” he recalled thinking at the time—but at first he wasn’t sure what his part should be.
“Usually when I say something, tweet something, or post something on my Instagram, it don’t really turn out right,” Lil Baby said. “Where I come from and the way I speak, a lot of times it get misinterpreted. I was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to be quiet about this situation and I don’t wanna just throw something on my page.’”
One day, after coming back from a protest, he found himself inspired. “I’ma just make a song,” he remembered thinking.
“I don’t got no writing process,” he added. “I just go in the studio.”
The result was the single “The Bigger Picture,” another instance of Lil Baby’s incisive style. “I find it crazy the police’ll shoot you and know that you dead but still tell you to freeze,” he rapped. “Fucked up the way that we livin’ is not gettin’ better, you gotta know how to survive/ Crazy I had to tell all of my loved ones to carry a gun when they goin’ outside.”
The song was a hit that vaulted him to a new stratum of recognition, but as a number of critics pointed out, it was hardly a departure from what Lil Baby had already been doing.