On his 2020 album My Turn, Lil Baby embodied a heavyweight boxer the night before his title shot. But his latest, It’s Only Me, is the championship defense against some dude they pulled off the street to lose. While his rapping was hungry then, now he’s extremely comfortable. It makes sense: As it stands, Lil Baby is one of the biggest rappers on Earth. He’s got commercials, a Budweiser World Cup theme, a major look in a new book about Atlanta rap history, and a whole ass documentary about his life at 27 years old. In that film, Untrapped: The Story of Lil Baby, which came out this summer, the story is more about his popularity than the music itself. When it was time to talk about My Turn, they might as well have had the director turn the camera on himself, shrug, and say, “Hey, it’s a Lil Baby album and people really liked it. I don’t know what else to tell you.” That way of thinking feels ingrained in It’s Only Me, as if all Lil Baby had to do was show up and rap. Nobody will care about the missing subtleties, right?
But those nuances do matter. One of Baby’s gifts is the way he can manipulate language with his voice, turning a forgettable line into words to live by, depending on how intensely, passively, or melodically he raps. This isn’t a Jack Harlow situation, where folks are more into the idea that he’s a good hang, rather than how effective the songs are. The nuts and bolts of the singsongy rhythms matter. Lil Baby is at his best when he’s using those tricks to switch between moods, but there’s just one on It’s Only Me, and it’s indifference: not in the too-cool-to-care kind of way, but in the way when words have no weight behind them. On “From Now On,” his bar about buying too many houses stands out solely because it’s a wild problem to have, but it’s not tied to any emotion. This happens a lot across the record: He gloats about dinner with Kris Jenner on the intro, or about blowing a bag on new veneers on “Everything.” He doesn’t seem to be trying all that hard, and ends up sounding as hollow as when Tracy Morgan’s 30 Rock character did a stand-up routine about how people eat their lobster in St. Barts.
It’s not that Baby’s tracks need to have tons of depth, but they should at least make you feel something. Take “Heyy,” which doesn’t need much to work, other than an extremely simple, catchy, and strangely funny hook. “Danger” has some of the most routine Baby lyrics ever, but he delivers them as if they’re life-changing, and that’s what makes them work. When he’s locked in, he can spit or croon a line that lingers long after he’s said them. Sometimes it’s because they’re chilling: On “Double Down,” he raps, “Too many dead contacts in my telephone,” his numb croon infused with grief. Other times, it’s because he can lay out a ridiculous scene and offer a detail that adds personal specificity. “It’s like sixty girls, me and gang, and no one got their phone,” he spits on “Back and Forth.” The “no one got their phone” bit is said with a hilarious sigh of relief.
These moments don’t happen enough across 23 songs to mean that much. He doesn’t even sound inspired by the trusty song templates that have long been his bread and butter. On the rags to riches intro, he just sounds bored; the mandatory collaboration with Young Thug feels like a leftover; and the track with a few straightforward minutes of introspection is missing here. “Top Priority” is close, but ultimately lands all over the place: He goes from celebrating buying his mom her own salon to a DJ Akademiks diss and crypto investing. In moments like these, flashy beats could have made a critical difference, but for the most part, the instrumentals from Murda Beatz, Tay Keith, and others are predictably safe and blank. That’s not a problem on My Turn, because the rapping does most of the leg work, but when it’s not up to snuff, he’s exposed. All it takes is one opening for the belt to be up for grabs again.
