In early 2017, SahBabii’s “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” became a sleeper hit, continuing a trend of light-hearted youngsters infiltrating the Atlanta trap scene with impishly playful romps. The Chicago transplant has identified his sound as “melodic trap” and likened it to racing a Mario Kart beach track on Wii. He is a surrealist who finds delight in the bizarre, emphasizing melody over meaning and concentrating on the little vocal flourishes and ad-libs to flesh out songs. The kaleidoscopic quality to his music beams in vibrant colorways.
Few seemed to follow “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” back to the 2016 mixtape that produced it called S.A.N.D.A.S., or Suck a Nigga Dick Ah Something, a beta test for a polished product just about ready to go to market. The song was one of several tracks that proved a relative compositional acumen, but it was “Pull Up” that stuck with audiences, and with good reason; it synthesizes some of the most interesting things happening in Atlanta in recent months with relative ease. Soon the song had remixes from T-Pain, Fetty Wap, and Wiz Khalifa. A label bidding war ensued, and Warner won the rights to the upstart, who feels built for the streaming era, playlists, and virality.
The newly remastered S.A.N.D.A.S. is an attempt to capitalize on Sah’s healthy buzz. It’s a bit like slapping a fresh coat of paint on a used car and pushing it back onto the showroom floor, but it can serve as a suitable crash course in his spasms and bird calls for the uninitiated. Aside from the title track, the project is largely the same, just with a noticeable improvement in sound quality. The only new additions are the recently released “Marsupial Superstars” with his brother T3 and the long-teased “Geronimo,” both of which put into action all of his strengths, twitching in and out of phrases and moving in little leaps and bounds. The charm is the seamlessness: the seemingly endless propulsion and how fluidly everything happens.
Since stepping into the spotlight, Sah has acknowledged Young Thug as his forbear, whose influence cannot be ignored. Sah is less dynamic, significantly less captivating in action, and the recently released “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” remix featuring Thug only magnified the gap between the two. He’s nowhere near as unpredictable as Thug and he smooths out some of his predecessor’s kinkier flows. Sah’s style is steadier and less gnarly, but more certainty doesn’t mean there’s more purpose. Actions and words are both often aimlessly assembled here, even when you know what’s coming next.
The tape has a very loosely recurring jungle theme, particularly on “King of the Jungle,” “Purple Ape,” and “Titanoboa,” where he compares himself to animals without explanation. The components of his songs are mostly the same—the phrase “animal planet,” armed robberies, hundred round drums, lots and lots of fellatio—and after a few listens a compositional formula emerges: triplet flows constructed on repetitive melodic phrases. But then there are songs like “Chit Chat,” which transcend their basic moving parts to form something nearly supernal.
At his sharpest, he can string together haymakers (“That Glock get to burning like gonorrhea/That chopper sound off, onomatopoeia”) and flat-out outlandish non sequiturs (“Recording that hoe with no kissing scene/How you suck dick but don't eat string beans”) that anchor his more delicate tunes. There’s a fun scheme where he rattles off references to various Steves (Irwin, Urkel, Harvey, Jobs, the family from the Disney Channel show “Even Stevens”) in quick succession. But at his most derivative, he exposes the things separating him from the stars he emulates. “Bullshit” sounds like a low-budget rework of a Future and Zaytoven collaboration. “Cracks & Crevices” is a half-mumbled, half-crooned ditty that relies heavily on the laziest Young Thug tropes. Even “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” marries midgrade Thug vocal turns with dead-eyed 21 Savage gun talk.
It can be difficult to reconcile the SahBabii appearing in interviews—the one who turned the number of the beast into a symbol for the most basic element of life, worries about the ozone layer, decries capitalism, and wants to design video games—with the one who appears on S.A.N.D.A.S., simply because his melodic musings don’t seem to share the same thoughtfulness. That isn’t because his SoundCloud persona isn’t as philosophical, or because these topics don’t make their way into his music—no 20 year old should have to rap about global warming; it’s that his music doesn’t provide the same window into his personality. So far, he’s spent more time projecting images of his sires than growing into his own. Re-releasing S.A.N.D.A.S. is a lateral move reiterating his defining truth thus far: he has yet to find his voice.
