Art by Evan Solano
All the critics love Paul Thompson in New York.
It’s not often that a 25-year-old artist can be said to have taken a long hiatus. But Baby Keem is nearly five years removed from his last record, The Melodic Blue; that gap, combined with the opacity of his public persona and his proximity to rap superstars, had begun to make him seem like an accessory to other people’s fame rather than a driver of his own. The hiatus between LPs created a narrative vacuum that was filled largely by the fact that Keem is Kendrick Lamar’s cousin, and the suggestion that it was this tie, rather than any quality of his own, that landed the younger rapper on Kanye West albums and magazine covers. The thing about gravitational orbits is that they’re tough to escape.
On Ca$ino, the Las Vegas-raised Keem shades in the gaps in his biography and clearly articulates a thematic and musical sensibility—marked by digital bounce and resolve in the face of systemic collapse. Here, he ensures that the extreme poverty and familial discord of his childhood collide with his charmed adulthood. It’s done in a way that can discomfit the listener: a mother homeless and sleeping in tents, a million Porsches that all need to be serviced. Dead family members hang like spectres from the rafters of Circus Circus. You scroll past clips of Keem at his album release and see Kalshi gaming out the odds that Iran will exist next weekend. None of the evils are new, but they’re interconnected in new ways, expanding faster than ever, seemingly by design. The record bounces, it stops, it sputters, it barrels forward again. The house always wins.
Keem’s literary achievement is one of careful calibration: He illustrates just how cruel and capricious the chances of life in America can be, but rather than let the system’s illogic sap the story of any stakes, he obsesses over the fortunes of those forced to participate. On the opening song, “No Security,” money is a wedge between Keem and his loved ones, who look at him like they’re “going to the bank”—a familiar story in hip-hop, but one given new dimensions when handouts and hangers-on are replaced by credit notices for back payment of your mom’s rent. He tenderly raps about his mother’s trips in and out of shelters and rehab, and about his beloved grandmother, but keeps circling the notion of abandonment, whether figurative (“Raised by the wolves”) or painfully literal (“I barely had parents”). The title of the album’s other bookend, “No Blame,” suggests a tidy resolution to the relationship between Keem and his mother, but the pain of their alienation lingers like the second-hand smoke he remembers clouding their desert apartments.
Of course, Keem hit a sort of genealogical jackpot. Since the DAMN sessions, almost ten years ago now, many of Kendrick’s freest, funniest performances seem to have been coaxed out by his young cousin. (There is something symbiotic going on: Keem helped Kendrick mutate his post–To Pimp a Butterfly style, which in turn changed Keem, which in turn…) Their collaboration here, “Good Flirts,” is yet more evidence of an obvious familial chemistry, but is more muted than what they’ve done in the past. The labor is also more divided. Here Keem provides the scaffolding for Kendrick to dart through—“Shit, I gossip with my bitch like I’m Young Thug, too!”—rather than flit back and forth with him. This feels at first like a missed opportunity for a “Hillbillies” reprise, where each rapper pushes the other into more heightened, more absurd territory.
But it also bolsters Keem’s reputation as someone always breaking new formal ground as a songwriter. Even when the component parts are uninspired, the superstructure is hard to deny. Keem has always tried to marry Carti’s clipped exuberance with a more traditionalist, long form approach to writing; he’s a gifted singer with the rare ability to build dynamism without bringing the energy way down. As is the case with many versatile rappers in the post-artist development era, Keem’s first two records are scattered to near-incoherence. Ca$ino reveals someone suited to both the white-hot, all-id wake of Whole Lotta Red and the self-consciously autobiographical Great Albums that are never all the way out of vogue.
Until now, Keem had always been a little too Travis Scott-brained: Every track needs to have at least one beat change, needs to be at least so baroque. This collection of tracks—from a cadre led by Scott Bridgeway, Cardo, Danja, and Keem himself—occasionally drifts into this over considered mode, but is on the whole sparer, more focused, and markedly better for it. (Even the title track, which does in fact include a hard reset, is a smart, serrated iteration on post-F1LTHY rage.) The palette is synthetic and warm and packed with melodic ideas, a Feist interpretation here, early-aughts R&B warped by Twitter spats. This shrewdness is mirrored in the sequencing: There are mirrored crescendos on the front and back half, ramping up from and down to “No Security” and “No Blame,” broken up by the subdued Andre 3000 homage “I am not a Lyricist,” perched squarely in the LP’s middle. Sober as that track is, it’s notable that it gives way to a duet with Too $hort—the underlining of a lineage, like Suga Free on Oxymoron or MC Eiht on good kid, m.A.A.d. city.
Since it was thrown up ad hoc in the middle of the desert, Vegas has been a hub for whatever evil is dominating at the moment: first the mob, then the banks. Keem takes that spiritual corruption as an implied starting point and finds its physical embodiments: the fluorescent lights humming in a county jail foyer, the cold desolation of I-95. In doing so he captures that core, particularly American contradiction, which is felt most acutely in the vast West: a land of endless theoretical opportunity and crushing sclerosis.
About halfway through Ca$ino, Keem wonders whether his family staying in Long Beach would have spared them some of the pain they suffered in Nevada. Later, on one of the innumerable unsatisfying vacations he writes about, Keem finds himself in the Bahamas with a beautiful woman who’s scared of the ocean. Yet Keem doesn’t deploy this as a cheap irony—it plays, instead, like they’re both drowning. The moment of panic is there, and then it’s gone, blotted out by the next anxiety, the next duffle bag of money, the next high, the next obligation. It seems unsustainable, and it probably is. But this is an album by someone still young enough to believe that, if everything goes just so, he can still beat the house.
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