To throw Damn Hykeem “Baby Keem” Carter has released a series of three short documentaries. They are titled Boommanafter his childhood nickname, and are filled with videos of his childhood shot by his aunt LaConnie Govan. Seeing them you understand what life Baby Keem has led: the birth in Los Angeles to an absent mother, the move to Las Vegas with his grandmother and aunts, the beats and then rap as an activity in which to find comfort. Directed by Govan with Alexandre Moors, the trilogy underlines the symmetry between the child Keem who listens to everything happily in the car Move Bitch by Ludacris and the adult Keem who receives a Grammy in 2022 from the hands of Ludacris for Family Tiesthe single made with his cousin Kendrick Lamar.
In Boomman Lamar is also there, but he is a secondary presence and does not distract attention from the essence, that is, the context in which Keem grew up and how it influenced him. For many, the rapper has never been more than a family member and protégé of Lamar with a record, The Melodic Bluelacking the thickness of a Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. Now Boomman and the album Damn they clarify once and for all that Keem may be under contract with Lamar's pgLang, but he is ready to tell a story that is his alone.
If the three episodes of Boomman34 minutes in total, end with a sort of redemption, that is, Keem finally succeeding, Damn begins and ends in a tormented way. “I'm not a lyricist / I'm just a bastard here to experiment,” he raps in I Am Not a Lyricist with a cadence reminiscent of André 3000. “I'm not here to play with words, I'm here so that my voice is heard”. Although the production of Damn is shared with others, including Danja (see Timbaland's 2000s hits on which he collaborated as Ayo Technology by 50 Cent), Cardo Got Wings and Scott Bridgeway, you can tell that Keem thinks like a producer and is interested in exploring various worlds rather than rigidly locking himself into one.
Keem's desire for adventure leads him to take unexpected paths. As in Dramatic Girla track that wouldn't be out of place in the repertoire of Aminé, Tyler, the Creator or other rappers with a balance between bravado and introspection. Use soft samples from Honey Honey by Feist (in Birds & the Beesa title that recalls a similarly titled 2011 piece by Schoolboy Q and Lamar), You Know the Feeling by Steve Wightman (in House Money) And I Do Love You by Billy Stewart (in Highway 95 Pt. 2). In I Am Not a Lyricist there's Citizen Cope, in $ex Appeal Too $hort appears.
Lamar is also there, but his presence isn't as cumbersome as it was in The Melodic Blue. In his verse of Good Flirts he raps “Shit, I gossip with my girl like I was Young Thug,” a benevolent reference to Thugger and his girlfriend Mariah the Scientist, dealing with the consequences of Thug's disastrous prison phone calls that were leaked last year. Regardless, the dominant figure on the album is Keem. Sometimes he screams, or uses an angry flow or sings, but regardless of how he uses his voice he always manages to sound light.
Because Keem put so much pain in the tracks of Damn compared to the pieces that aim at pop and the evocation of the world of Las Vegas? “I get on stage and fake a smile, but I can't,” he raps in No Security. And in the final duet with James Blake No Blame he writes a sort of letter to a largely absent mother: “I was 7 years old, I was waiting for you in my pajamas / You said you would come home, you should never have promised me”. It comes to mind 2Pacalypse NowTupac's 1991 debut that ended with the rapper berating his mother, Afeni Shakur, as a Part Time Muthaa part-time mother. It took Pac another four years to write Dear Mamaunderstanding that he had to respect his mother's problems and indeed appreciate what he had done.
Will Keem ever achieve this kind of clarity in the midst of a burgeoning career? Damn it seems like a transition album, a difficult but necessary transition to go further The Melodic Bluebut it doesn't have the grace and immediacy of the 2021 debut. Perhaps the answer to the question is just postponed. However, Keem emerges as an artist with his own personal vision, a vision that he has every intention of pursuing, regardless of his past.
From Rolling Stone US.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
