“I was in the neighbourhood and he was like, ‘What you doing in the neighbourhood?’ I was like, ‘You already know what I’m doing’,” Baby recalls. Finding himself at a crossroads after his prison release, he was persuaded to take rap seriously by a famous former schoolmate, fellow Atlantan and trap icon Young Thug, who made a rather unorthodox offer to Baby. “You can’t even imagine how far this is from where I come from,” Baby now tells NME.
“Probably the last year-and-a-half… I had to make myself stop saying, ‘You ain’t a rapper’. “I went from telling people I ain’t a rapper to telling people this my life,” he recently told Vanity Fair. In fact, this slight hesitance continued into Baby’s early career, and he’s spoken about how it’s taken him years to actually finally refer to himself as “a rapper”. Just four-and-a-half years ago, Baby was leaving prison after serving a two-year sentence for drug and gun charges, not yet convinced that his future would be in music. Lil Baby’s staggering rise wasn’t always a foregone conclusion, and the star himself hasn’t always been so sure of his path. As it turns out, he was right on the money. Before its release, he explained why he chose to name his album ‘My Turn’, telling fans in an Instagram Live video: “I feel like everybody else had a lil’ turn. That’s more than The Weeknd, more than Post Malone and, quite unfathomably, more than Taylor Swift too.īaby himself appears to have foreseen what a mammoth year 2020 would be for him. Its tracks racked up a mind-boggling near-four billion combined streams, resulting in a total of more than two-and-a-half million equivalent album units shifted. In a landscape where album sales can be bumped up by merch bundles and chart positions secured by strategic release date tinkering, it might be better to put the figures into a bit of context: ‘My Turn’ was recently named not only the most-streamed album of 2020 in the States, but the most popular album of the year overall as well. That latter song also secured Baby two Grammy nominations – for Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song – although many fans believed he deserved even more awards nods. The album’s deluxe edition, which followed in May, featured seven additional songs that were arguably even stronger than the original’s 20 tracks and earned Lil Baby his highest-charting single to date in ‘The Bigger Picture’, an impassioned response to the killing of George Floyd and global Black Lives Matter protests, which saw Baby rap: “ I got power, now I gotta say somethin’”. Following 2018 debut ‘Harder Than Ever’, which included big-break Drake collab ‘Yes Indeed’, his second studio album ‘My Turn’ saw 26-year-old Baby (real name Dominique Armani Jones) claim his first US Number One upon release last February, with the record since going double Platinum. Without question, it’s been a massive 12-month stretch for the trap star. You can forgive Lil Baby, who takes our call from what appears to be a parking lot of a luxury car dealership, for looking at the positives. He pauses for a second and adds: “It’s been a hell of a story.”
You see, for Baby, it was also “the best year of my life”. “I know for a fact that 2020 is going to be one of those years where we’re going to look back and be like, ‘Man, we got through that motherfucker’,” he says. Speaking to NME over a Zoom call on one of the final days leading up to Christmas, the Atlanta rapper is ruminating on how he would describe the past year to his future grandchildren. Most would agree that 2020 was a true shitstorm of a year, but it’s understandable that Lil Baby might have a different view of it.
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