How Atlanta History Shaped Lil Baby and Generations of Rappers

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/arts/music/lil-baby-atlanta-rap-capital.html

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To hear his mother tell it, Dominique Jones always was a special child.

Before he was Lil Baby, Atlanta’s latest international rap superstar — and even before he was known only locally on the southwest side of his city as a formidable gambler and precocious teenage hustler — Dominique tended to be a quick study.

As a toddler, he was already helping his mother, Lashon, around the house, diligently folding laundry and straightening up the refrigerator without prompting. When Dominique was about 4, Lashon recalled when we spoke in 2019, she bought him a pair of in-line skates and was amazed when, without instruction or even a hand held for balance, her youngest child and only son had soon mastered his glide, tricks and all.

“I look up, and he’s out there skating backward,” Lashon said. “He looks at it, he sees it and he can do it.”

Dominique also revealed himself early on as a sponge for language. Before he could read, he was quoting the Bible, gaining a reputation as something of a local attraction among the Baptist preachers who visited the Black Southern hub of Atlanta to spread the word. “They would always look for him — ‘Where’s the young man that always gets so excited at church?’” Lashon has said. “Every time they came to town — ‘Where the little preacher man?’”

After those verses came music. Once, when Dominique was still a small child, Lashon was driving with her younger sister while listening the local Atlanta bass rapper Kilo Ali. “Turn it up a little bit,” Dominique demanded from his car seat, according to his mother’s memory.

After taking in the song for a moment, he called again toward the adults up front. “Turn it down now,” he said, considering what he had just heard. “That’s Kilo Ali?” Dominique asked, apparently knowing full well. “I went to school with him.”

Lashon and her sister could only exchange confused glances. Dominique had never been to school a day in his life, and certainly not with an adult rapper from the nearby Bowen Homes projects. Yet somehow, the city’s sounds were already somewhere within him, as if through osmosis. “What’s your comeback after that?” Lashon said, reminiscing and still astonished. “We was blowed.”

Some two decades later, the story of Lil Baby, 27, whose triumphant new album, “It’s Only Me,” was released last Friday, is both an individual tale of roundabout stardom by an idiosyncratic artist and also a recurring pattern. As the latest in a long line of Atlanta rappers to take a raw Southern sound to the top of the pop charts — from ’90s and early 2000s industry trailblazers like Outkast, T.I., Jeezy and Gucci Mane to the streaming stars Future, Migos, 21 Savage, Young Thug, Gunna and Playboi Carti — Lil Baby could only have come from one place.

“Honestly, I think there’s something in the water,” he said in an interview over FaceTime last week. “It’s the upbringing, it’s the culture, it’s the things we see, the people we watched on TV. It’s a repeating cycle of greatness.”

That he and his forebears all happen to share geographic roots with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan, Uncle Remus and Spike Lee, “Gone With the Wind” and the Black spring-break party Freaknik is not a coincidence. It could only have been Atlanta.

Long a site of collision — politically, racially — and contradictory cultural history, Atlanta was called “south of the North, yet north of the South” by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903. In the decades since, the city has been “a bastion of both white supremacy and Black autonomy,” according to one historian, and often “on the brink of either tremendous rebirth or inexorable decline,” in the words of another.

Building upon this confluence of tension and opportunity is Atlanta’s constantly regenerating rap scene, which has become, over the last 30 years, one of the most consistent and consequential musical ecosystems in the world. The generations (and micro-generations) of local artists who have emerged from it have routinely exploded the expectations of what a Black man from little or nothing — and they have, until recently, tended to be overwhelmingly men — could hope to achieve in the wider American consciousness.

Largely through music, Atlanta has become a conveyor belt of exceptions.

LIL BABY IS nothing if not a product of the city’s extensive rap lineage, but he has been equally influenced by Atlanta’s nonmusical history. Now a mainstream figure and the father of two sons, he grew up the unruly teenager of a single mother on government assistance.

Baby’s eventual descent into what he and his friends refer to as “the streets” — an amorphous world of violence, drug-dealing, camaraderie, rivalry, risk and reward — would go on to inspire most of his music. But even beyond the effects of Atlanta’s vast income inequality, or the neglect and destruction of its public housing around the 1996 Olympic Games, the harsh realities he raps about in semi-autobiographical detail also stem from how he was raised, rooted in his mother’s own story.

Lashon grew up in a strict Baptist family in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood, an area that had once been an upper-class white suburb but was 86 percent Black by 1976, following waves of white flight. Her father worked for Delta, fixing planes for the Atlanta institution that helped to make the city a worldly concern.

But Lashon’s otherwise placid youth was rattled by what came to be known as the Atlanta child murders, when more than 20 Black boys and girls were kidnapped and killed between 1979 and 1981. The sixth child to go missing, Jeffrey Lamar Mathis, 10, was one of Lashon’s best friends at J.C. Harris Elementary School. (The spelling of Mathis’s first name varies in the public record, from FBI files to news accounts, a detail perhaps indicative of the attention paid to the case.) She knew him as the class clown.

In the neighborhoods directly affected, parents saw the lack of initial law-enforcement interest in the disappearances as neglect based on their racial and socioeconomic status. Children were no longer allowed to play outside, some were pulled from school altogether and the city eventually imposed a curfew.

“We definitely couldn’t go anywhere,” Lashon recalled. “We could hardly go out and play, and we weren’t even really allowed to before that. But after, we never gonna have a childhood.”

The writer James Baldwin, who covered the case for “Playboy” and later in a book, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” tied the violence and tragedy of those years to the area’s history, dismantling the fantasy that Atlanta, only 100 years on from slavery, represented any sort of sanctuary for Black people. “There is absolutely nothing new in this city, this state or this nation about dead Black male bodies floating, finally, to the surface of the river,” he wrote.

In 1982, Wayne Williams, a local aspiring music mogul, was convicted of killing two adults, and blamed also for the child murders, although no one was ever tried in those cases. In the years that followed, skepticism remained, especially in the Black community, about the scope of Williams’s overall guilt.

This was the backdrop against which Atlanta rap was born, and the sounds, words and beats that would come to define the city bore more than a trace of the chaos and pain of this era.

André Benjamin and Antwan Patton, who would become known as André 3000 and Big Boi of Outkast, were 4 years old when the first children disappeared. Jermaine Dupri, the mastermind behind So So Def Recordings, was 6. Jeezy and 2 Chainz were toddlers. T.I. and Gucci Mane were right behind them. All were raised among the paranoia, the skepticism of institutions and the two-sided coin of parenting options — shelter versus exposure to the cold world — only exacerbated at that time.

“The music, storytelling, folklore and culture that emerge from the poor and marginalized communities of Atlanta — what we call ‘trap’ — are built on the generational, psychological, linguistic and ideological roots that grew from the traumas of the Atlanta Child Murders,” wrote Dr. Joycelyn Wilson, who has used hip-hop to teach social justice.

FOR LASHON, THE crimes were decidedly local, close at hand. “The crazy part was, we knew Wayne Williams,” she said. He had worked with one of her aunts. “It took me a long time to get over it.”

Yet it was only later that Lashon realized how directly she could trace that foundational thread of her life through the decades to the kind of mother she would become.

As Dominique grew into a mischievous and independent teenager, earning the nickname Lil Baby from the older boys he hung around with in the nearby Oakland City neighborhood, her initial instinct was to smother him the way she had been smothered by her parents.

But Lashon soon realized that this was futile — a mother’s desperate helplessness in the face of her son’s unwieldy ambitions. “Skipping school, smoking weed — I was rebellious,” Baby said. On “Shiest Talk,” from “It’s Only Me,” he raps, “Of all my mama’s children, I’m the bad one/I admit that.”

But Baby knows now that his success in music may have rearranged those rankings, and finally being able to make his mother proud — and financially secure — is a sentiment that occurs over and over again in his new songs. “Mama, I got rich/look at your dropout,” he raps on another track.

“I was the bad one, but now I’m the good one,” Baby said with a smirk during our recent interview. “Look how life changes.”

Lashon had warned her son all along about “the streets,” to the extent that she could. “When you make the decision to get in them, know that it’s consequences for being out there,” she told him. But she knew he had to find out for himself.

“At first, I didn’t let him do nothing or go nowhere,” she said. “But I felt guilty for keeping him in, ’cause he’s a boy — they supposed to get out, do stuff, have friends. I don’t know if that was because of my childhood — sheltered because of the Wayne Williams thing. But I knew that boys, once they get out there, they get out there.”

Lashon was confident that her son was bright, self-possessed and excelling at the things he was putting his mind to, even when she was forced to confront what exactly that was. She realized that Baby’s drug-dealing and gambling money was serious when she heard him going up to the attic repeatedly. One day, unable to quell her curiosity, she went to see the gains for herself and found stacks of dirty bills, smoothed out and carefully rubber-banded.

But by the time he was 20, following arrests for guns and marijuana possession, plus some failed diversion programs, Lil Baby found himself in a maximum-security prison.

IT WAS WHILE incarcerated that he finally decided he would give rap a try. After his release in 2016, he started working with Quality Control, an Atlanta label that specialized in stories like his, joining the flock of the local executives Kevin Lee, or Coach K, and Pierre Thomas, who had shepherded acts like Migos and Lil Yachty to stardom.

In his first two years as a rapper, Baby showed his commitment by releasing seven mixtapes and albums, ultimately leaving his old life behind. In 2020, his breakout LP “My Turn” became the most-listened-to release of the year in any genre, topping even Taylor Swift.

“I moved on from slanging drugs and pistols/can’t be thinking simple,” he declares on “Real Spill,” the opening track from “It’s Only Me.”

But first, in prison, Baby learned the extent of the Atlanta area’s small-town feel, the way that his mother’s life folded into his. “That’s one of the most craziest things she’s ever told me,” he said of her connection to the child murders. “But I actually ended up in prison with Wayne Williams. In the same dorm.” Williams worked around the facility, so they saw each other every day.

That, to Lil Baby, was the essence of Atlanta — his ties to the city’s darker side as omnipresent and relevant to his story as his pre-fame relationships with rappers. “There’s so much of a deep-rooted connection,” he said. “Even the artists. If it wasn’t for the Young Thugs, the Migos, the Peewee Longways — I was around a lot of people, and I’ve seen them come from where I come from. That gave me a lot of inspiration.”

Today, Lil Baby has been nominated for eight Grammys, winning once, and earned corporate endorsement deals, an Amazon documentary and a spot performing at the 2022 World Cup.

On “It’s Only Me” — his 10th release since 2017 — Baby sounds further than ever from the neighborhoods where he grew up, something he expresses not just with boasts, but with survivor’s guilt and ambivalence.

“Youngins out here wildin’ with no guidance/all they care about is who they kill,” he raps on “Heyy.” “I was tryna keep that [expletive] in order/it got harder ’cause I was never there/it’s a better life out here/I promise, brodie, I’mma keep it in they ear.”

There is even a song called “California Breeze,” with lyrics about private dinners in Malibu.

But Baby is adamant that Atlanta will always be a part of him, his roots there inseverable and his essence inextinguishable. “The main thing that I do still keep with me from Atlanta, when I go everywhere, is me,” he said. “My upbringing, my manners, my way of thinking, my way of living. Everything comes from Atlanta. No matter where I go, I’ll never be able to get distance from Atlanta.”

“Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story” will be published on Oct. 18 by Simon & Schuster.