Key Takeaways
- Lil Baby pushed back on claims he fell off, telling DJ Clue that hip-hop’s sales have declined across the board: “Nobody does the numbers that they did in 2020.”
- He argued that hip-hop lacks feel-good music, pointed to “Dead Fresh” from his new album ‘Fresh’ as a return to that sound.
- Lil Baby vowed to keep releasing music despite lower sales and negative publicity, saying artists have to “beat the curve” by sticking around until their fortunes improve.
Lil Baby continues to push back on the narrative that he has fallen off.
In a conversation with DJ Clue on ClueRadio, Lil Baby made his case that hip-hop as a whole has seen a decline in sales, compared to about half a decade ago.
“Nobody does the numbers that they did in 2020,” he said at the 2:29 mark, referring to the year he released My Turn, which was the most-consumed album that year in the United States, with 2.63 million equivalent album units. “Hip-hop not there. I don’t care what song you put out. It’s just not there right now.”
Lil Baby argued that when he started out in 2018, moving 30,000 units as a “street n***a rapper,” like himself, used to be considered “great,” adding that among that “street” rapper group, “It wasn’t nobody rapping on our level, selling 200,000, 300,000.”
Lil Baby proposed a theory that the prevalence of violent subject matter in hip-hop songs has fueled an agenda to push the genre off its top spot.
“From feel good music to kill kill music, so when the kill kill music became the No. 1 music, that’s why I think it became the agenda, this can’t be the leader of the music,” he said.
Lil Baby believes “Dead Fresh,” off his recently released album Fresh, is a return to the feel good music that the genre is “lacking.”
The rapper also maintained that today’s artists need to appeal to TikTok by creating a song that can go viral.
Lil Baby asserted he will continue to drop music in the hopes of seeing an upswing in sales.
“You gotta beat the curve, meaning you gotta stay in it long enough for it to turn back over,” he said. “So you gotta roll with it. If you don’t do the same numbers, so what? I ain’t gonna be like, ‘I ain’t dropping.’ I already know it ain’t gonna do the same numbers. Whatever the case, I’m gonna keep going until I can beat the curve versus hold on.”
“A lot of people be scared to drop,” Lil Baby continued. “They don’t wanna go through the bad publicity. I’ma keep dropping, fuck that. You got to. You gotta withstand the curve.”
When asked about the feeling of his sales struggles being singled out (his 2025 album WHAM, while debuting at No. 1, has not approached My Turn’s septuple-platinum status), Lil Baby responded, “I understand that too ‘cause I’m one of the biggest in hip-hop, so hip-hop down, Lil Baby down. I don’t know why they choose to just be at me.”
