Kendrick Lamar was going back through some old Beach Cruisers and doing single-riding mornings; he was going without a phone for the first time in months. Death and loss made some shifts, but God continued to show up in two places: his records and his family. The statement showed up on oklama.com on August 20, 2021. It was Kendrick Lamar’s first communiqué since 2017 (the year he dropped DAMN.), and the final word from the poet in three years. He was at work in the studio, putting together the label’s latest album, which he has called home for 17 years; he said the company he loves would still need to continue after he departs. Beauty in completing something and forever having faith. Seven days later, he would share his voice on a cut-off of his twenty-year-old cousin’s highly anticipated single.
“family ties,” the pair’s single from August 27, 2021, the tenth track on The Melodic Blue, Baby Keem’s major-label debut album on pgLang and Columbia, was the source of Keem’s only Grammy to date. He hadn’t had a single since “Pray for Me,” which was with The Weeknd in 2018 from Black Panther: The Album, and when he broke the hiatus, Lamar’s first release on pgLang was given to his Keem’s album, not his own. They are cousins from families that overlap in two cities, and Lamar tells i-D in 2020 that while their grandmother died when he was thirteen, his family scraped together enough they could, so that a Compton mortuary would remove her body from Vegas. Credits go to Cardo, Outtatown, Roselilah, Deats, Jasper Harris, and Frankie Bash for providing a triumphant horn-ready stadium song. It easily divides into two halves with three monster beats. Keem takes the first, and Lamar doesn’t enter until the third beat switch. The last fifteen seconds of the track have Lamar and Keem trading lines.
In the ‘90s, he says, he sat inside with the windows rolled up and tinted, completely alone and independent, and “somebody had a strap at the party, and all the questioning was: Who let him in?” He saw double in the projects, got mad at himself, and learned to shut it out. His mother had to cater for the coupe that sped his younger cousins down the street to Popeyes after school. Everyone was playing both sides, “a red dot, a wrong red eye,” a headshot. Then, the numbers came in the autobiography: a million dollars for grandma, but who did he offend by giving it to her? Keem tells Lamar in i-D’s 40th anniversary issue that he grew up with his grandma in Las Vegas, that financial distress fell upon his childhood, and that at fifteen, he borrowed three hundred dollars from her so he could get a microphone off Craigslist. His uncle told him he had a chance, then he popped out; repeated; did it again and again and again. He thanked Man-Man (Kendrick’s nickname) “for opening doors,” offered him a “bunk on the tour bus to compose on,” and “reaches for the stars on his tiptoes in a city where the folks ain’t sleepin’.” Critics have “everybody tapped”; Keem responds, “How could you ask like I don’t be writin’ my raps?”
The second half of the track belongs to Lamar, and he opens with a non-specific jab: “Smokin’ on your top five tonight,” then your what’s-his-name, then your shows. The hook repeats itself endlessly. Then he states his own status: “pgLang, Rollie gang, SIE,” and don’t you address him unless it’s with four letters (which we assume is GOAT), while he's been ducking the overnight activists, pandemic, and social gimmicks. He mentions a lineage back to the ‘70s, “the Al Green offspring, guns and the melody,” and “a wrist on cryotherapy,” that after he “presses that button, they better get right like the ambulance is comin’.” Talk about the lines that age like Kyla Pratt.
At the beginning of the record, Keem rapped about his mother’s catering money, his grandmother’s million, and Man-Man’s tour bus. Lamar’s first section ran through prophecy, and an ambulance implied that someone was going to get their life straightened out. “Us two ain’t alike,” he’s already saying, “He ain’t been through nothin’.” And then he is trippin’, jugglin’, his mind amazing, bopping off when the occasion calls for it while adding “brother” on every bar (fuck Hulk Hogan). He’s rich; his mother knows he’s made it. New flows coming—be patient, capable of multitasking like Megan Thee Stallion—and then 2021, when he is taking over, not taking any prisoners. Although he didn’t release a new album until the next year. He said the last year fucked up rap listeners, that whoever went platinum is a visitor, that facts have been falsified, and that the game cannot survive without him. The only metaphor is a vaccine, then Elohim and rebirth, and an instruction for the ages: “Before you get to the Father, you gotta holla me first, bitch.” Lamar then laments that the single hard drive needs to be burned. Nobody’s safe when he’s active, and he mentions that Ye changed his life (you know who), but he’s at heart an old-school Gemini. Both he and Keem do the last half in one room. The latter uses his signature two phones, but shows up with just one, as Lamar has one daughter, but she has many sons in the rap game.
Keem opened up for Lamar on The Big Steppers Tour. Its 103 shows spanning across 4 legs between June 2022 and March 2024 (if you count the festivals) also included Tanna Leone. The tour earned a reported $110.8 million across 73 dates. They performed “family ties” together, but on August 18, 2022, in Paris, on one of the dates featured in a film entitled The Big Steppers Tour: Live from Paris, which debuted October 22, 2022, on Prime Video (112-minute concert). In Texas on April 26 2025, at the last Arlington show of The Grand National Tour, Lamar gave new life to “family ties” with a new verse for a 4-year-old record that remains unreleased to this day (“You niggas will never compare to me/Fuck poppin’ for nuttin’, declare the beef/My momma’n’em so scared of God/On God, you better be scared of me”).
While attending the 64th Annual Grammy Awards in Las Vegas at MGM Grand Garden Arena on April 3rd, 2022, Ludacris announced Keem as the winner for Best Rap Performance. He defeated “Up” by Cardi B, “My Life” by J. Cole featuring 21 Savage and Morray, and “Thot Shit” by Megan Thee Stallion. At twenty-one, he stood in an arena in his home city holding his first Grammy Award from a song, half of which he dedicated to his mother, catering a car, and a bunk on someone’s tour bus. The pair would collaborate 5 times in documented record: “Nile,” a Beyoncé & Kendrick Lamar cut of the Lion King: The Gift which was co-produced by Keem long before there were ever Keem-led tracks. “family ties,” “range brothers,” and “vent” of off The Melodic Blue with the later being co-produced by Keem along with 30 Roc, Scott Bridgeway, Dez Wright, Ricky Polo, Sloane, and Jahaan Sweet. Lastly, “The Hillbillies” is a YouTube exclusive from May 30, 2023, that was later streamed on June 5, produced by Evilgiane from SURF GANG.
Of all his records, “family ties” made the Billboard Hot 100 at #18, became Platinum on February 2, 2022, and won him a Grammy within his native region while simultaneously being a part of Kendrick’s touring set across four years and two tours. In the first moments, a chopper, referred to as a bird, circles above, while a prophet replies to Metatron and Gabriel in the final lines. Between them, a twenty-year-old local Las Vegas native, along with his 33-year-old cousin out of Compton, delivered what’d become the anthem to rap at home.