Is it possible to beat allegations of nepotism? Once the public learns your insider connections, will the haters ever let it go? Is it better to embrace your family ties, or stake out your own path?
These questions will likely follow Baby Keem, West Coast rapper and cousin of Kendrick Lamar, for the rest of his life. Up to this point, Keem’s entire career has orbited around Kendrick (his mother’s first cousin), who can credibly claim to be the greatest rapper of all time. After a short string of viral singles, Keem signed to Kendrick’s pgLang label in 2020; the next year the pair confirmed the rumors on the collaborative track “Family Ties,” which anchored Keem’s debut studio album The Melodic Blue and later won a Grammy for Best Rap Performance. That song is the biggest of a number of credited and uncredited collaborations between the two. The cousins enjoy a palpable chemistry on the mic, with Keem’s off-kilter vocal stylings bringing out a fun, oddball side of hip hop’s greatest contemporary statesman.
Baby Keem’s second studio album, this year’s Ca$ino, finds him struggling to break away from the massive gravitational pull of planet Kendrick, with mixed results. The title references Keem’s turbulent childhood in Las Vegas, raised by aunts, uncles, and a beloved grandmother caught in cycles of poverty and incarceration. The album injects an introspective confessional mode into Keem’s signature mix of melodic bars and moshpit attitude. “I’m a genre-bender comin’ out a broken home” he raps in staccato on the booming “Circus Circus Free$tyle.” The obligatory cousin collab comes on the horndog song “Good Flirts,” which finds Kendrick rhyming “goofy” with “coochie” and “booty.”
The album succeeds in complicating the public persona of Baby Keem, mining the personal trauma of a rapper so far mostly known for fratty ragers like “hooligan” (“I’m sexy and blessed, hoe”) and “vent” (“Have you ever been punched in your motherfuckin’ face?”). It’s harder to label someone a nepobaby when he’s telling you about his mother’s struggles with addiction and his childhood raised on food stamps. Yet some of this introspection fails to land, with many fans online mocking Keem for adopting a carbon copy of Andre 3000’s voice on the mid-album confessional “I am not a Lyricist.” Yet again, the album’s most streamed song is the Kendrick collaboration on “Good Flirts.”
Watch the official music video for “Good Flirts” by Baby Keem featuring Kendrick Lamar and Momo Boyd on YouTube:
Yet none of this mattered to fans at The Anthem on May 28, when Baby Keem brought the Ca$ino Tour to DC. Standing atop a towering set made to look like the rooftop of a seedy gambling parlor, Keem led fans through raucous singalongs of hits both new and old. The young crowd bounced along throughout with phones held aloft, desperate to catch every aggressive line and dramatic beat drop on camera. Their glowing phone screens testified to Keem’s undeniable star power, haters be damned.
The Ca$ino Tour’s setlist is impeccably timed, serving up a mix of new and old songs which kept the audience locked in. Although gambling themes and a glitzy Vegas aesthetic run throughout the new album, the production offers a pleasing variety of raging bangers, sexy bass lines, and sparse moody grooves. These styles were frontloaded into the set, with Keem belting out “Ca$ino,” “Good Flirts,” and “I Am Not a Lyricist” in rapid succession, only to follow it with hard-hitting songs from earlier in his career like “vent,” “booman,” and “ORANGE SODA.” The crowd ate it all up, chanting along to both the old songs and the new ones.
Alongside Ca$ino’s more introspective turn, Keem has stated in interviews that he is “excited to share more of myself with the world.” Yet despite this professed desire for openness, Keem remained frustratingly aloof during his performance in DC. Usually perched on the rooftop set and far removed from the crowd, the rapper was often backlit, leaving his face obscured in shadow. Although the monitors displayed touching home videos from Baby Keem’s childhood at points throughout the night, his trite comments on stage did not achieve this same level of intimacy (“this night is for you DC,” “I can tell you came to party,” etc).
Despite the rowdiness of the crowd, Keem’s stage presence was rather subdued as he paced back and forth, lacking the athleticism of rage rap peers like Travis Scott and Playboi Carti. There was a puzzling mismatch between the rapper’s lyrical honesty and his seeming disengagement from the crowd in DC. The staging was another missed opportunity, as a single female backup dancer provided fleeting signals (a swipe at a digital slot machine, the removal of a feathered headdress), which gestured at the casino aesthetic without connecting to any deeper meaning or offering much visual entertainment.
Watch the official music video for “Family Ties” by Baby Keep and Kendrick Lamar on YouTube:
But perhaps I’m just an annoying critic. Certainly none of the Baby Keem fans that night agreed with me. After running through a string of hits, late in the setlist Keem took the spotlight and basked in a roar of applause that lasted for nearly five uninterrupted minutes. He milked the anticipation for every bit it was worth before finally dropping the booming horn riff that announced the arrival of “Family Ties.” To Keem’s credit, he holds his own in duets with his cousin, and the song did not suffer for cutting short the Kendrick half in the live performance (the same cannot be said for TDE peers like ScHoolboy Q, who is cursed to live forever in the shadow of Kendrick’s massive guest verse on his 2014 song “Collard Greens”).
“Family Ties” was the main event, and all that was left afterwards was to tie a bow on the night. Keem showcased his melodic side with the bouncy sex jam “Birds & the Bees” and the moody soft rock groove “16.” Then, as if determined to emphasize his new era of self-reflection, he closed the set with “No Blame,” the final song on Ca$ino. Over a looping piano and a James Blake sample, Baby Keem delivered some of the most starkly personal lyrics of his career: “You and grandma fightin’ for me, CPS is at the door / I still don’t blame you, mama / Smokin’ cigarettes in that house made it haunted / Skeleton in the closet, spent my birthday running from it.” He finished the song and walked off the stage, as a CA$INO sign glowed in the darkness. There was no encore.
