The North Carolina rapper’s third album in 13 months is stacked with the same regurgitated phrases and flows from earlier projects. This time, they’re starting to go stale.
On DaBaby’s biggest song, he asked himself to switch the flow. He didn’t. “BOP” hurtled forward like he’d been shot from a cannon. His potent, barraging raps sound like they’re spurting out of him; the joke goes that they’re all different versions of the same song. DaBaby aims to be everywhere at once: on remixes of any Spotify chart-topper, coursing through TikTok, following pop culture wherever it leads. Of course he put out an album in the middle of quarantine—on the cover, he poses in a face mask, declaring his relevance to The Current Moment.
Blame It on Baby reaches for more and resonates less. Half the album is stacked with the same regurgitated phrases and flows from earlier projects, stale the third time around; for the rest, DaBaby follows formulas other than his own. Though he’s known for being a capital-R Rapper, DaBaby clears his throat—literally, before admitting, “My voice kinda fucked up”—and tries to sing, sometimes with grating results. On “Rockstar,” he doesn’t imitate Roddy Rich as much as adjust his tone to complement the feature. His voice becomes softer, as close as DaBaby gets to tender, as he talks about the physical jolt of PTSD, “waking up in cold sweats like the flu.” On “Find My Way,” he dribbles syllables over languid guitar. He follows A Boogie’s lead on “Drop,” catatonic and crooning. This is the first music he’s released that sounds limp.
Some of that slowness comes from trudging through the murk of non-apologies and fledging repentance. DaBaby apparently slapped a woman at a recent event; in January, he was arrested for allegedly robbing someone and then pouring apple juice on them. Aggression is a key facet of DaBaby’s music, fueling his viciousness and velocity, and it’s often cartoonish; still, the record’s glimpses of violence can become disconcerting, especially when they involve women (“Put my dick down her throat ’til she throw up,” he raps on “Lightskin Shit”). “Can’t Stop,” the album opener, is weighed down by DaBaby’s insistence that he’s not sorry. On “Sad Shit,” he mimics a generic, desolate Drake song, soaking his voice in AutoTune and rasping pleas. It’s all fake, the sentiment and the sound, and after a few crooned apologies, DaBaby shouts, “Fuck that,” and goes back to tallying up the women he’s slept with. It’s not until “Jump,” eight tracks in, that the album turns familiarly propulsive—but it’s not DaBaby, it’s YoungBoy Never Broke Again doing his best DaBaby impression.
If you’ve listened to DaBaby for a while now, you know his bits. He groans about fans asking for photos. He growls that he’s a dog. Even his most creative rhyme patterns become predictable when he’s employed them so many times before. Usually, the repetition is accompanied by rattling bass and blown-out speakers, or raps so fast the flows create a vortex; on these more subdued, slowed-down tracks, every recycled word is noticeable. Most of his past producers have followed the Jetsonmade model of pouncing drums and bass, a concentrated bump of adrenaline, but the production throughout this album slinks and tingles. DaBaby’s charm gets diluted; he sounds measured and restrained, not words typically associated with DaBaby. This is music to bob your head at, not lose your shit to.
Ever the savvy marketer, DaBaby does manage a few highlights that seem packaged to go viral. “Nasty” pairs a gleaming lilt from Ashanti with a fun, dynamic Megan Thee Stallion verse. It doesn’t have the explosive power of “Cash Shit,” Megan and DaBaby’s last collaboration, but the song is still mesmerizing, with DaBaby’s absurd, precise eroticism in full force. The album’s payoff arrives on the title track, a two-minute opus that stitches together four beat switches and contorts DaBaby’s flow over and over. It builds, it thrills, it makes you feel like you can run through a wall—everything a DaBaby song can and should do, when he asks it of himself.
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