BLAME IT ON BABY
As far as hip-hop is concerned, 2019 was near unanimously the year of DaBaby. The Charlotte MC turned himself into a bona fide superstar through a combination of near ubiquitousness and unprecedented consistency in the fun-to-bar ratio of his verses. *BLAME IT ON BABY*, then—his first project of 2020 (2019 brought us two, along with an inordinate amount of guest verses)—is DaBaby forging onward despite a year marked by the inescapable calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of *BLAME IT ON BABY*’s release, DaBaby appeared on six separate songs within Apple Music’s influential Rap Life playlist; this is clearly a man who stays in the studio. Which is not to say that he’s any more in love with his own voice than his contemporaries. In fact, *BLAME IT ON BABY* features an all-star list of collaborators including Quavo, Future, A Boogie wit da Hoodie, Roddy Ricch, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, and even early-aughts R&B princess Ashanti. If there is anything at all to blame DaBaby for, it’s the much-appreciated sense of normalcy that hearing a song like “TALK ABOUT IT”—where he brags about being nominated for a Grammy and draping his daughter in designer jewelry—might provide for hip-hop fans in the moment.
The North Carolina rapper’s third album in 13 months is stacked with the same regurgitated phrases and flows from earlier projects. This time, they’re starting to go stale.
The Charlotte, North Carolina rapper DaBaby builds further momentum with 'Blame It On Baby', his third studio album in 13 months
Sweeter, smoother, and designed to be more palpable to the masses, DaBaby’s third studio album, Blame It On Baby, is a course correction from a course that didn’t need correcting, an adjusted recipe meant to appeal to a subset of fandom that’s no longer his commercial core.
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At the dawning of his career, I valued DaBaby’s rise into mainstream and his devaluation of gangsterism in rap as something more than