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This is music to bob your head at, not lose your shit to.Įver the savvy marketer, DaBaby does manage a few highlights that seem packaged to go viral. DaBaby’s charm gets diluted he sounds measured and restrained, not words typically associated with DaBaby. 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.
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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. Even his most creative rhyme patterns become predictable when he’s employed them so many times before.
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If you’ve listened to DaBaby for a while now, you know his bits. 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. 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. On “Sad Shit,” he mimics a generic, desolate Drake song, soaking his voice in AutoTune and rasping pleas. “Can’t Stop,” the album opener, is weighed down by DaBaby’s insistence that he’s not sorry. 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”). 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. Some of that slowness comes from trudging through the murk of non-apologies and fledging repentance. This is the first music he’s released that sounds limp. He follows A Boogie’s lead on “Drop,” catatonic and crooning. 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. On “Rockstar,” he doesn’t imitate Roddy Ricch as much as adjust his tone to complement the feature. 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. 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.
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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.īlame It on Baby reaches for more and resonates less. DaBaby aims to be everywhere at once: on remixes of any Spotify chart-topper, coursing through TikTok, following pop culture wherever it leads. 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. “ BOP” hurtled forward like he’d been shot from a cannon. On DaBaby’s biggest song, he asked himself to switch the flow.