Lil Baby

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  • The Voice of the Heroes
    The Voice of the Heroes
    The Voice of the Heroes

    At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the 2021 alliance of Lil Baby and Lil Durk is historic. There hasn’t been a real-time coupling of two of contemporary hip-hop’s most beloved and revered MCs like this since at least 2015’s What a Time to Be Alive. Their The Voice of the Heroes project—the title references their respective nicknames—is a testament not only to their relationship, but to the respect they have for their legacies. It’s hard to imagine either being more popular within the hip-hop space, and yet hip-hop—the kind heavily informed by street life, to be specific—is what we get across The Voice of the Heroes, wholly. The closest thing to a pop aspiration on the project is the Travis Scott feature, and even Cactus Jack taps into his gutter side while detailing the consequences of going against the gang (“Bro, do it silent without a potato,” he says on “Hats Off”). Elsewhere on the album are guest appearances from Meek Mill, Young Thug and the face of pain rap himself, Rod Wave. Though it would appear Baby and Durk spared no expense with regard to production (London on da Track, Turbo, Wheezy, Murda Beatz, among others), the two never lose sight of the fact that the real draw is what happens when they get in the same room, which is the kind of rapping that has made each a king in his own right, compounded by the kind of chemistry that makes them sound like an actual group.

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About Lil Baby

The story goes that Lil Baby (born Dominique Jones in 1994) didn’t even really want to rap. He’d had encouragement—P and Coach K, the Atlanta kingmakers/Quality Control heads who helped launch Migos, had been on him since he was a teenager hustling dice in the street—but Baby wasn’t interested. But two years on a possession charge gave him more time to think than he wanted. Then the work came fast: Within a year of starting to rap, he’d released six mixtapes and a full-length album, 2018’s Harder Than Ever. (Young Thug, an early booster, paid him to spend time in the studio instead of the streets.) Compared to his Atlanta peers (Thug, Gunna, Migos, etc.), Baby’s persona was muted: He shrugged off fashion shows, didn’t have tattoos (he didn’t want potential business partners from the buttoned-up world thinking he was something he wasn’t) and kept his boasts mild: “I never call myself a GOAT/I leave that love to the people,” he raps on 2020’s “Emotionally Scarred”. But the lyricism was there, as were the low-key intensity and no-frills ethic that have become his hallmark. By the end of 2020, he’d been nominated for a Grammy Award, made the chart-topping album My Turn and was named Artist of the Year at the Apple Music Awards. Baby quickly leapfrogged those high-water marks with The Voice of the Heroes—his chart-topping 2021 team-up album with Chicago’s Lil Durk—and the next year’s solo triumph It’s Only Me. In both contexts, he punctuates his drawled air of well-earned confidence with flashes of scrappy urgency like someone who no longer needs to prove himself unless he’s directly challenged.

HOMETOWN
Atlanta, GA, United States
BORN
3 December 1994
GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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