Wednesday 6/17: Lil Baby—"The Bigger Picture"
Today, Eli and our guest writer Michael Brooks share their thoughts on the new single from Atlanta rapper Lil Baby.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him) and Eric Bennett (they/them). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. Now we’re, also a M-F newsletter about songs. Our format is simple: a link to a song and a short take from each of us about what we think of it. Each day of the week has a corresponding genre: Monday is indie, Tuesday is punk, Wednesday is hip-hop, Thursday is pop, and Friday is misc.
Today, we share our thoughts on "The Bigger Picture" by the Atlanta rapper Lil Baby. We’re joined by music critic Michael Brooks, who’s an Assistant Editor at The Alternative and a writer with bylines at FLOOD Magazine and The Grey Estates.
Lil Baby—“The Bigger Picture”
Michael Brooks:
After years of trying to stand out from the crowded sea of SoundCloud rappers and autotune crooners, Atlanta MC and Quality Control protege Lil Baby has finally started to come into his own as an artist. In February of this year he dropped My Turn, which is far from a perfect album but is infinitely more interesting than his first few mixtapes. On “The Bigger Picture,” Lil Baby tries his hand at protest music, resulting in a clumsy but well-intentioned track that just misses the mark. I have to give him props for using his platform to say something given this current moment, but compared to YG’s “FTP” and even the most recent Run The Jewels record, his bars are too inoffensive and unassertive to truly capture the essence of a great protest song. Lil Baby clearly seems to be passionate about what’s going on in the world right now, but in the end lines like “Corrupted police been the problem where I’m from / but I’d be lying if I said it was all of them” strip the track of all of its momentum and blur his message.
Eli Enis:
Whereas YG’s “FTP” functions as the ACAB anthem of 2020, “The Bigger Picture” is less a rallying cry and more of a timely soliloquy. Although Lil Baby is a Future-indebted crooner who’s always been more style than form, I was pleasantly surprised to hear how strong his flow and how clear his delivery is on this new protest track. At a time when most music feels insufficient for this moment, it felt right to hear a contemporary MC take three full verses to spill his heartfelt thoughts on police brutality. Besides the hook that leaves a little bit to be desired, the song itself sounds good, but there are a handful moments where Baby lyrically contradicts himself in awkward ways.
He spends the majority of the first verse proclaiming that he’s fed up with police brutality and explaining the stressful day to day of being a black man in society (checking his mirrors when he drives, packing heat when he leaves the house). But in between all of these sober descriptions, he drops the bar, “Every colored person ain't dumb and all whites not racist,” which feels like him preemptively responding to bad-faith trolls in the comment section. He does the same thing in verse two when he sheepishly inserts a Not All Cops line that just feels. . .corny.
However, I will say that Baby redeems himself in the final stretch when he outright acknowledges that he’s built a career off of rapping about “killing and dope” (a reflection of his upbringing), but that that’s not the future he wants for anyone else. There’s another line in that third verse where he questions innocently why people suddenly forgot about COVID-19, and then follows that with an admission that he’s not an expert, he’s just here to vent about this messy, confusing time to be alive. Whom among us, Lil Baby? I just wish I could listen to this thing without wincing at the thought of those choice lines being in there to soothe fragile white listeners. It’s missing the burning cop car fury that “FTP” captures so vividly. But then again, who’s to say there’s not room for both?