Why Lil Baby Isn’t Interested in Comparing His Trajectory to Success to Jay-Z’s
A lot of times in music, not only do artists get compared to their contemporaries, but they also get compared to the ones that came before them. In a recent interview with Ebro, Lil Baby responded to the fact that he’s around the same age when an iconic rapper dropped his debut work.
Lil Baby is one of the biggest hip-hop artists out right now
The Atlanta rapper is one of the most successful and popular hip-hop artists of the moment. He signed with Quality Control and started putting out several mixtapes in 2017. He collaborated with Lil Yachty and Young Thug and had a moderate hit with the single, “My Dawg,” which reached No. 71 on the Billboard Hot 100.
He really started to break out in 2018 with the release of his single, “Yes Indeed,” which featured Drake, which reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song was taken from his debut album, Harder Than Ever. The album was just one of three projects from Lil Baby in 2018. He put out two mixtapes, Drip Harder with Young Thug and Street Gossip. Young Thug and Lil Baby’s Drip Harder included the hit single “Drip Too Hard,” which reached No. 4 on the Hot 100. Several songs from the album that weren’t singles became hits, such as “Close Friends” and “Never Recover.”
2019 didn’t include a project release for Lil Baby but it did see the release of the single “Baby,” one of his several collaborations with DaBaby, as well as the single “Woah,” which would be on his 2020 album, My Turn. The album has been a huge success so far, landing at the top spot on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart. Almost every song from the album has charted on the Hot 100.
The rapper isn’t trying to compare himself to Jay-Z
Lil Baby recently sat down with Ebro for an episode of the Rap Life podcast on Apple Music’s Beats 1 Radio. The radio personality discussed how Lil Baby is 25, which is around the same age Jay-Z was when he released Reasonable Doubt. Jay-Z was actually 26 when that album was released and it is considered to be one of the best debut albums of all time, one of the best hip hop albums of all time, and often regarded as one of Jay-Z’s best albums.
In response, Lil Baby said, “I can’t compare myself to nobody in that gap ’cause it is a lotta more sh*t nowadays. I got a whole Instagram with 10 million followers. No way Jay-Z and them had [that]. It’s so many different ways where I won’t even let that get ‘caught in my head.”
The rapper continued, “I’m smart enough to know it wasn’t the same avenues, either,” he added. “So I won’t even put that type of s**t in my head.”
