Album Review: It’s Only Me by Lil Baby
Album Review: It’s Only Me by Lil Baby
Lil Baby’s third studio effort is functionally geared to streaming success.
Taken from Phil’s defunct blog, The Wax Report, an extensive review of the most important albums, covering everything from production to lyricism and overall cohesiveness.
Lil Baby is the most unimaginative and greatest rapper in the world. Once you’ve come to the taste of your voice through a song like “Drip Too Hard,” The Bigger Picture,” or one of his infinite, incredible feature parts, you know how hard this guy from Atlanta can rap. A few of his old mixtapes also deliver brutal street rap. And then you stand in front of this new album, nod at every song, and can attest to each song that it raps very well right now, yet almost nods. It’s Only Me shows the greatest possible way of separating feature, single, and album artists.
The common thing is that success will still happen. Lil Baby has an iron-rehearsed formula, according to which he generates every song here, which is sometimes loosened up by a feature. And this formula is a blessing for playlisting. If the songs work, they can be entirely streamed into the floor. And a few works quietly: “California Breeze” with the flip of an L.A. indie track sounds summery and wonderful, and the hook is also one of the happiest on the record. “Not Finished” is reminiscent of Harder Than Ever highlights; it sounds hungry like hardly anywhere else. The Nardo Wick collaboration “Pop Out” probably has the most viral potential; the “Pushin P”-esque beat switch on the idiosyncratic murmuring Nardo, all parts sound strong, and both beats work.
But if you have paid attention to the track titles, you already suspect a bit of the problem with the whole thing: A tremendous artistic appeal of Lil Baby is his down-to-earthiness. He was always this relatively normal guy from the worse neighborhoods of Atlanta; he flexes but not into the absurd. He does rap as a business and does not make himself unpopular by excessive demands or ambitions. It is precisely this self-image that keeps him within very narrow limits on album length. If you look at track titles such as “Heyy,” “Forever,” “Danger,” “Not Playing,” or “FR,” you will notice that there is no track here that splits the limits of its sound.
This consistency makes him likable and pleasantly predictable, but even more than the previous album, My Turn, which also brings its lengths, a uniformity is created here that can hardly be excused. In writing, bad pacing is when each sentence is precisely the same length, and good style is always created when you use sound and rhythm and focus imaginatively at your discretion. This album is like twenty pages of prose in a block sentence, and each sentence has precisely the same sentence structure, length, and emphasis. At some point, you can only partially take away the ambition to do it for the kids in Atlanta, while elsewhere, this is already the third time that Google has misjudged his fortune.
Equally worrying is how little the singles of this record have stuck. No one will say anything against “In a Minute”; the song is as solid as it is tame. However, the fact that a number has reached single status as happy and unfocused as “Heyy” is a testimony to the outstanding moments on this album. You remember the strange “Heyy” squeezed into the hook, unfortunately, for all the wrong reasons. Features such as Fridayy or Jeremih also align little with this fundamental lack of solid hooks: Baby could do this himself, but musically, he seems full and uninspired here.
You are happy about all the features that bring a bit of accent to this very monotonous broth. But it’s too little and too late; if you listen to It’s Only Me in one sitting, you can feel that somewhere in the sound, the air is out. Like modern Drake or Migos albums, they set the functionality of a hefty album tracklist in the streaming age and the resulting commercial success over a successful album experience. In addition, you notice that Baby’s ear is almost completely out for such a successful artist for the beats, for whom close cooperation with Gunna used to be very useful. It’s Only Me shows that Baby could still be on top regarding flow and energy, but the album urgently screams for a radically intervening executive producer.
Mediocre (★★☆☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Pop Out,” “California Breeze,” “Not Finished”