Ask a Southerner whether or not Florida is part of the South and the answer will vary, but the most common response might be that Florida is just Florida. It’s not not the South, but it juts out from the region both geographically and culturally. The Florida hip-hop continuum—from Miami bass to Trick Daddy to Rick Ross to Raider Klan—has never really fit neatly into the Southern rap tradition. Florida is somehow deeper than the Deep South and dirtier than the Dirty South.
As trap has become globally popular, it’s strayed from its regional roots, becoming a kind of common denominator rather than a local style. Tampa Bay rapper Big Baby Scumbag first caught my attention with “Dale Earnhardt,” which reminds you that trap is, above all else, a Southern thing. His music videos drip with regional flavor: sucking the juice out of boiled peanuts, shotgunning Bud Lights, stomping around the mud in a Ghillie suit, and stopping at Waffle House for an All-Star Special. As a born-and-bred Southern boy, I used to think Florida was an island all its own. After listening to Big Baby Scumbag, I’m not so sure anymore.
Big Baby came up in the same scene as rappers like XXXTentacion and Wifisfuneral, and he’s affiliated with Atlanta’s Awful Records, but his aesthetic diverges from both. The predominant sound of his work is throwback trap, 1017-style: organ swells, high-pitched synths, 808 bass designed to blow out car speakers. Big Baby’s profile is still relatively low, but he’s already hopped on instrumentals by heavyweights like Zaytoven and TM88, and last year’s Juvenile Hell mixtape was entirely produced by trap forefather Lex Luger.
Until Juvenile Hell, Big Baby’s discography was just a string of singles coated with pastiche, with cover art inspired by Pen & Pixel and track titles that tend to be proper nouns like Lil B: “Austin Powers,” “Metal Gear Solid,” “Tony Stewart,” “Major Payne.” Celebrity names and pop culture references generally provide a hook or central punchline, but they also give Big Baby a chance to play around with his persona, allowing him to embody different characters on different songs (a shagadelic playboy, a good ol’ country boy, etc). His colorful and cartoonish loosies are supported by a canny sense of marketing: He’s released a Trix-flavored craft beer and a line of condoms (take the “S” out of “Scumbag” and you’ll get the pun) and has even hinted at a Big Baby Earnhardt racing game.
Big Baby Earnhardt anchors the rapper in a central character: the Man in Black, the Intimidator himself, Dale Earnhardt Sr., the most controversial and canonized figure in all of stock car racing. Across the mixtape, Big Baby gives flex rap a new meaning: He’s not just showing off but working out. The album incorporates a wide palette of sounds, each one presented by a different part of Big Baby’s personality. On “Modelo Time (Bebe Grande),” his sensual side is accompanied by flamenco guitar, while he tells the woman of his affections that he prefers to be referred to in Spanish. He’s a lonely cowboy on the range with a country drawl on “Toy Story,” a vocal-fried white girl on “Nicole Ritchie,” an honorary Chopstar on “Til’ My Death.” His voice is malleable; he wears many different trucker hats.
The guests Big Baby recruits offer a similar smorgasbord of styles: SoundCloud legend sickboyrari (FKA Black Kray), emo rapper Lil Aaron, and underground kings like Project Pat and Lil B. Drain Gang and Sadboys-affiliated producer CadyCutThroat shows up for “N**GAS IN SWEDEN,” an instrumental interlude that marries trap and tropical house, and Meltycanon pushes Big Baby into math-rock territory with “Street Lights.” Big Baby’s flow is hard-hitting, with barely any space to breathe between bars, but here he expands his vocal range with vaguely country-western hooks that reveal a sensitive songwriter underneath the racing jacket.
Dale Earnhardt Sr. was an embodiment of the Southeastern U.S. He’s a walking, talking contradiction, a ruthless businessman with his name licensed to anything who still kept it authentically down-home. The legend of #3 endured because Dale Sr. proved the South didn’t have to be just one thing. He was the champion of a sport that most people think is for backwards chumps, but he hated the Confederate flag. He respected his forefathers, but he pissed off a lot of people with his driving. It’s like how Big Baby Scumbag’s music is proudly Southern, but it plays with tradition as much as it pays homage—the engine of a Tesla in the body of a stock car, with the trunk speakers of the most pimped-out, candy-painted Cadillac imaginable. The sound is classic, the structure is retrofitted and refurbished, but the eyes are squarely on the finish line.
