Modern Review: My Turn (Deluxe)

Score: 3/5 | Released: February 28th, 2020

Written By: Anthony Seaman

                

            My Turn created an unfortunate myth about Lil Baby. The myth of assured greatness. At the time it seemed right; his catalog of hits alongside Gunna were stacking up, the Drake stimulus package worked like a charm (“Yes Indeed”), “Freestyle” became certified in the rap-along lexicon, all while holding the exclusive title of being a Top 3 Young Thug prodigy (at this moment Gunna and SahBabii could do no wrong, while Youngboy took up #4 while the world adjusted to his enigmatic ways). Baby’s previous major release, Harder Than Ever had a refreshing range of street records while the mixtape Street Gossip was a more ominous universe featuring heavy hitters Gucci Mane, 2 Chainz, Offset and Meek Mill forcing his lyrics to be the center of it all. It was exciting to see Atalnta diversify broad enough to mix a traditionalist in with so many boundary pushers, and with many of rap titans beginning to lose touch or grow more inconsistent, you could envision a future with him among the top stars. After successful singles, interviews, features, and music videos, My Turn became one of the few 2020 albums to get a proper rollout pre-lockdown. The Southern US as a whole was also one of the few sections of the modern world with loose enough restrictions that bars and large gatherings could go on without institutional backlash, allowing his invigorating party tracks to thrive as they were meant to. In the early period where everyone was still figuring out how long exactly we’d be living within our own confines there was less music being released and by pure lack of challengers, Baby’s trajectory hit overdrive. My Turn was 2020’s highest selling rap album and the most streamed album in the US over the calendar year. Everything had worked out in his favor. After its release the coronation of Lil Baby as the new generation's leader was all but completed. Fans adored him, peers respected him, and the potential to grow and expand his skill set seemed boundless. The most important distinction this time period gave him was also adding a notch in his belt that his rap partner Gunna did not have, a breakout studio album. Gunna’s Drip Season 3 was an immaculate mixtape that eclipsed any of Lil Baby’s solo work, while Drip Or Drown 2 (his official major label debut) was a moderate success. Gunna’s style was also more encompassing of fresh sounds thanks to the melodic nature of his delivery, opening doors into more inventive sonics. For the first time in their respective careers, Baby had lunged for the spotlight on his own, and was fully basking in its beams.

            Now, a perfectly fine collab project with Lil Durk exists and the high stakes affair that was It’s Only Me served in chart success but is in majority an album made to line digital recycle bins. Atlanta’s chosen heir fell flat. The cracks in his style in retrospect were right in front of our faces. His rapping falls more into an equivalency with one of those Fear Of God ESSENTIALS hoodies; to a casual consumer it’s a higher quality of a necessity we tend to take for granted, but at the end of the day it’s still just a pricey plain hoodie that represents nothing if not just having some more money.  What marks his greatest weakness is the Lil Baby word cloud is limited to designer brands and every phrase typed into 40oz Van’s cursed tweets. Song to song the rhymes blend together, which some would call a stylistic choice while in actuality it seems like a factory defect in his instinctual ways. The lyrics are rushed recounts of his days hustling without any drawn out soliloquy about why he’s living this life. Wear expensive watch, rap about expensive watch. Miss old girlfriend, sing about missing old girlfriend. It’s all very much in the street rap tradition; what’s understood doesn’t need to be overstated, it just is what it is at the end of the day. You just do these things to survive and it’s what you’ve seen every rapper before you has ever done and the novelty of those daily oddities is the sub-genre’s greatest asset. Regurgitating that second layer of comprehension only limits the amount of bars that could be given to something topically different and shiny. The biggest mystery of the album lies in how he was getting eaten alive by every feature. How the same guy who pushed J. Cole to the limit and outdid Drake on 2 separate occasions gets stumped by Moneybagg Yo will never cease to amaze me. 42 Dugg had his breakout moments on “Grace” and “We Paid”, “Commercial” shows him committing a fool's errand in trying to out-cool Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Wayne body bags Baby so brutally on “Forever” that him running around a year later claiming to be “the new Wayne of his generation” should have warranted legal action. Even Moneybagg Yo, a living parody of what a southern rapper is “supposed” to be, stands on equal footing with go-to producer Tay Keith providing a home game experience for the curiously rising Memphis spitter.

            In context to his own catalog My Turn is an 70-30 mixture of his two previous projects, with Street Gossip being the majority ruler. Breaking out of the dime-a-dozen Youtube beats that take up the majority of My Turn we get the orchestral hurricane of “Forever”, the jutting bop of “Sum 2 Prove”, and the eerie paranoia of the Project Pat produced “Gang Signs”, all of which have his most inspired writing.  “The Bigger Picture”, “Catch The Sun” and “Emotionally Scarred” are breakaways from the grit and grind of street life where social justice, love and emotional complexity breathe. Records like these give a perception of range, but is it an illusion? Is there still many layers to unfold within Lil Baby the artist, or has it been forever stifled underneath countless layers of foreign denims and factory grown diamonds? There’s an aversion to anything musically challenging on the tracklist for more than 2 songs at a time, forcing him to redistribute his focus from every other attribute purely into his flows. Raw instinct has always been the gasoline that fuels his artistry. Despite all the drum programming sounding similar in sound selection and even patterns, Baby instantly sniffs out the most pleasing oddball pockets to spruce up his mediocre environments. Once he or the listener is even slightly becoming distracted away by a text notification or paint drying, the angle he’s attacking the beat at is slanted to such a strange degree that only your gut would tell you works. To be just fine in so many areas while a savant in one aspect for any other rapper would leads to stale creations, and the fact each song hits just enough to keep you coming back shows how much charisma he harnesses individually. He leads the league in fun verses to rap along to. You never question if he’s fronting about his street certifications.

            2020 ended up as a year where Lil Uzi Vert was a streaming colossus, Boldy James outworked and outrapped (almost) everyone, and Lil Baby was vaulted into S-Tier superstar status despite the world burning around them all.  Within our brain fog Lil Baby's simple and addictive style allowed him to become the biggest rapper in the world. We saw someone who had built up enough trust, strike at a moment so perfect he couldn't have planned it. God herself put a GIA certified sparkle to our eyes, blinding us to the fragility of Baby as an artist. He was never the best option, he was just one of the last ones to squeeze in before the ship sailed. There’s still hope that the circumstances that allowed Baby to infiltrate such a high stature weren’t as flukey as the evidence suggests. Maybe it was going to come either way, the pandemic sped it up, and the slump that followed was going to come anyway. Maybe he is the star that peaked Young Thug’s interest and sparked a belief that he saw a natural rapper living within a gambling street legend was true all along.

Best Song: "We Paid"
Best Beat: "Forever"
Best Moments: Every 42 Dugg whistle, Lil Wayne on “Forever”, Baby having to explain to his niece that his diamonds are real on “Emotionally Scarred”, Verse 1 on “Gang Signs”, Starlito shoutout on “Get Ugly”, the back and forth hook on “We Paid”