All images via Shemar Woodstock
Dario McCarty knows the deal.
In a recording studio somewhere deep inside the belly of Sony Music’s flagship New York headquarters, just off Madison avenue, 19-year-old rapper Raq baby is slouched in the corner on a sofa chair, scrolling through TikTok. His eyes don’t lift from his phone as he calls out his request.
“Play a beat, twin.”
The studio engineer – who himself is flipping through the channels on the studio TV trying to find the Knicks game – pauses what he’s doing to heed the request. Clicking through MP3 files on a laptop, he works with Raq baby’s A&R, Nahum, to cue up a beat.
Nahum selects an alien instrumental that sounds kind of like a trap remix of the Star Wars theme. Raq baby looks up, his head tilting slightly, testing the vibe. He’s known to be picky.
“Shit gotta sound different, weird, nothing like another n**** beat,” he tells me. “It’s gotta have a mothafuckin’ head rock to it.”
Born on the Southside of Chicago – 69th street, the same as Lil Jojo and just five streets over from 64th’s O’Block – Raq baby has come a long way to this high-rise Manhattan studio.
As a kid growing up in the Chi, he passed his time skateboarding, playing ball, listening to drill artists like Keef and Durk, and bopping, a type of bouncy, butterfly-legged dance integral to Chicago culture in the early 2010s: “You couldn’t grow up in Chicago and not be drawn to [bop] – all them block parties and shit. You really had no choice.”
But around the age of nine, Raq baby moved to west side Atlanta. Although he always had a passing interest in rapping, at around the age of 16, time listening to melodic Southern spitters like JayDaYoungan and Future, he began to pursue it seriously.
The dual geographies of his upbringing color his music. He combines sample-laden underground Atlanta beats with the drill lyrics of Chicago, and a hint of Southern pain rap. This unique meld of regional sounds – and his peculiar beat selection – has propelled him to a cult-like following on YouTube and TikTok, and secured him a record deal with Sony Music’s Alamo Records.
“I made everyone in Atlanta want to hop on samples,” he claims to me, his body draped over his chair. “I was really the first one to start that wave, forreal.”
Whether true or not, his ear for sample beats is undeniable. The beats he gets on draw inspiration from all over the globe and across timelines. Oldies were a staple in the household growing up. The single “Soldier Love” – Raq baby’s initial breakout hit which has since amassed over 20M streams across DSPs – draws on “Show Me Love,” a 1993 Robin S club song family members often played.
“Mars” repurposes a breakcore sample for spacey, ethereal street poetry; if they make drill music in another solar system, this is what it sounds like. The sample on “Day By Day” might sound familiar from TikTok edits of Franklin Saint’s infamous Snowfall Season 3 monologue; Raq baby flips it into a hungry, high-octane track that mirrors the intensity of the original scene. “Got It Tucked” has street raps you can dance bachata to.
Sometimes the sample clearing process is easy and fast, Raq baby explains. For example: Flawed Mangos, the artist behind the TikTok-viral “Swimming” (which Raq baby heard scrolling through his for you page as a backdrop for motivational hopecore edits) was immediately a fan of Raq baby’s flip in “What They Told Me.” This made the clearance process seamless, but things are not always so fluid.
“When clearing samples, some people be strict about what you’re saying on the song,” he says. “Them fake high power ass people. We don’t give a fuck – we rappin’ ‘bout what we go through. Can’t rap about what you go through, we ain’t never did none of that shit.”
Even so, the rapper has some rather impressive clearances under his belt, from Drake and Rihanna’s “Take Care” to Childish Gambino’s “3005.” When I ask about how he clears high profile ones like these, he just laughs: “I’m on a hot streak.”
The current beat pack Raq baby is listening through is just as eclectic as his catalogue. One beat sees an electric guitar sample fused with some 808s, a rock music-Lex Luger drumkit frankenstein. Another sees a chipmunk soul sample paired with buzzsaw synths.
Raq baby listens to each one while scrolling through his phone and taking big puffs of a weed-stuffed joint. After maybe a minute or two of each one, his silence is all the go-ahead the engineer and his A&R need to flip to the next.
After what might possibly be 45 minutes, and countless beats – finally, there is a breakthrough. It’s a twinkling instrumental, full of piano keys.
“This bitch hard, twin,” he affirms, nodding his head.
Just like that – we’ve found the one.
Raq baby jumps up, grabs a bag of Lays potato chips from a snack table, and heads for the recording booth. Bathed in the crimson of the booth’s overhead lights, he sits on a stool in the center and, in between smacks of potato chips – that we can all hear at a comically loud volume over the intercom – he begins to record.
When it comes to song-writing, Raq baby works in punch-ins, freestyling one line at a time, humming melodies in between each bar until the next words surface from his brain. “It’s the Atlanta in him,” one of his homies in the booth leans over to tell me. Chicago rappers, he says, are historically more inclined as writers.
“How you feelin’ baby…” Raq baby croons into the microphone. His rapping voice is nasally, with a tinge of bleariness that you might get from talking into a fan. Each time he punches in a new line, he closes his eyes, as though concentrating to reach into another dimension and pull out just the right words into being in ours.
Tonight’s session draws out a street love song. The punch-in formula means topics and stories are created and discarded every other line: he covers a lover behind bars who he can’t wait to be released, cheating on a girl 1000 times before giving out a wedding ring, and going on “two-mans” with his Frenchie dog (“Lil Spilly” – Raq baby’s pet dog who previously passed away).
In less than half an hour – less time than it took him to pick the beat – the track is done.
Raq baby pops out of the booth and, standing behind the studio engineer, listens to the track back. He nods his head along to it, a fresh joint in hand.
When the engineer asks Raq baby what he wants to call it he doesn’t hesitate: “Two Man With A Frenchie.”
As they continue to listen to it back, Raq baby leans over to point out spots on the beat in the DAW where he wants the engineer to alter the EQ.
“I’ll adjust shit. Make it my own; you got to make it your own shit if you want it to sound good,” he says.
“It’s to the point he’s even begun producing some beats on his own from scratch,” Nahum chimes in.
“34 Blicks and Ted Bundy,” Raq baby confirms. “They my favorites from the new EP.”
The song is done, and our time together is drawing to a close. Our conversation veers towards the future, and I ask him where he sees himself in five years, being only 19, newly minted to rap success.
He approaches the question the same as his beat selection: with specificity and decisiveness.
“I’ll be on a yacht with Mike Epps, smoking a big ass blunt, broski,” he says. “Steph Curry Runtz. With seven of my artists on that bitch, and,” this next part he emphasizes, “50 bad bitches.”
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