Baby Keem Makes New Moves on ‘Casino’

Earlier this month, Hykeem “Baby Keem” Carter uploaded a trilogy of short documentaries to promote his second album, Ca$ino. Titled Booman after his childhood nickname and packed with video footage taken by an aunt, LaConnie Govan, the series is an unexpectedly trenchant and raw glimpse at Baby Keem’s early life — being born in Los Angeles to a wayward mother, moving to Las Vegas with his grandmother and aunts, and finding solace in making beats and, eventually, rapping. The trilogy, which is co-directed by Govan and Alexandre Moors, notes the symmetry between Keem as a baby, bouncing happily in a car to Ludacris’s 2002 hit “Move Bitch,” and Keem at the 2022 Grammy Awards, where he accepted a Best Rap Performance trophy from Ludacris himself for “Family Ties,” the sparkling single he made with his cousin Kendrick Lamar.

Lamar is in the Booman series, too. However, he feels like a tangential presence who doesn’t distract from the focus on Keem’s childhood environment and how it nurtured him. In the past, many fans viewed Keem as a familial protégé of Lamar’s, someone whose major-label debut, 2021’s The Melodic Blue, possessed a youthful verve lacking from the superstar’s intensely thoughtful and controversial Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. Both the Booman docs and Ca$ino make clear that while Keem remains signed to Lamar’s pgLang imprint, he’s ready to tell his own stories now.

The three Booman episodes, which collectively total around 34 minutes, end on a redemptive note with Keem finding success in the music industry. Meanwhile, Ca$ino begins and ends in anguish. As harsh as the images onscreen may appear, they can’t compare to how Keem expresses his emotions on these tracks. “I’m not a lyricist/I’m just a bastard child, here to experiment,” he raps on “I Am Not a Lyricist” in a cadence reminiscent of André 3000. “I am not here to play off words, truly here for my voice to be heard.” On Ca$ino, he shares the boards with several others, including Danja (famed for his work alongside Timbaland on 2000s hits like 50 Cent’s “Ayo Technology”), Cardo Got Wings, and Scott Bridgeway. Yet it’s clear that Keem thinks like a producer and is more interested in exploring musical ideas than carving out a distinctly unwavering personality.

Keem’s adventurousness takes him down some unexpected paths. On “Dramatic Girl,” he sings anxiously on a track that wouldn’t feel out of place coming from Aminé, Tyler, the Creator, or any other rapper navigating between swaggy dynamics and alt-pop introspection. “There’s more than one way you should love me,” he suggests as Sam Dew and Che Ecru lend support. He culls soft and emotive samples from Feist’s “Honey Honey” (“Birds & the Bees,” a title that echoes a similarly titled 2011 song by Schoolboy Q and Lamar), Steve Wightman’s “You Know the Feeling” (“House Money”), and Billy Stewart’s “I Do Love You” (“Highway 95 Pt. 2”). “I Am Not a Lyricist” features the bluesy alt-folk singer Citizen Cope, and “$ex Appeal” has a typically pimpish cameo from Too $hort (who just performed a similar service on Jill Scott’s To Whom This May Concern).

Lamaris on Ca$ino, of course, but he doesn’t nearly hijack it the way he did with The Melodic Blue. Perhaps the most newsworthy moment in his verse on “Good Flirts” is when he raps “Shit, I gossip with my bitch like I’m Young Thug, too.” It’s a pointed expression of support to Thugger and his fiancée Mariah the Scientist, both of whom weathered the aftereffects of Thug’s disastrously leaked jail phone calls last year. But the dominant figure on this album is Keem. He yelps, mutters in a rage/plugg flow, and sings, but no matter how he transmutes his voice, there’s a lightness that lingers in it.

It’s unclear why Keem has chosen to suffuse Ca$ino in pain, despite its pop detours and slot-machine allusions to life in Vegas. “Usually go onstage and fake a smile, but I can’t,” he raps on “No Security.” A duet with James Blake on the final track, “No Blame,” turns into a letter to his largely absent mother. “I was seven years old, waiting on you in pajamas/You said you would come home, should’ve never made that promise,” he harmonizes in a broken, sobbing cadence. The theme recalls 2Pac on his 1991 debut, 2Pacalypse Now, which ended with the rapper castigating his mother, Afeni Shakur, as a “Part Time Mutha.” It took Pac another four years to write his classic “Dear Mama,” and center his mother’s difficulties with him as moments to respect, appreciate, and love.

Can Keem reach that kind of clarity amid a soaring public profile? Ca$ino, which feels like a difficult yet necessary transition out of The Melodic Blue and lacks that album’s easy gracefulness, may not yield an immediate answer. But it certifies Keem as an artist with a distinct vision he’s determined to carry forward, no matter what happened in his past.