EFORE WE TALK about
anything else, we have
to talk about the dim-
ples. No man, woman,
or actual baby should
be able to smile like this: DaBaby’s diamond
grin—irresistible, disarming, roughly dimen-
sioned like the Cheshire cat’s—sits between
two deep craters of mischief. They’re the kind
of dimples that, when deployed, announce
some intention of funny business, the kind
parents warn their teenage kids about.
I know this because I’m sitting directly across
from DaBaby (and his dimples) on a couch
somewhere in downtown Los Angeles, and
I wonder aloud: Exactly how much trouble
did those dimples get him out of as a kid?
“Get me out of trouble?” says DaBaby.
“No, it probably got me in more trouble, shit.”
He smiles, and there they are again, peeking
out from behind his fingers as he rubs his
face. “They got me a lot of attention, espe-
cially from older women. They used to always
grab on to my cheeks and shit like that. I used
to hate it.”
At 28 years old, DaBaby has a gem-en-
crusted finger right on the pulse of rap.
He makes music that gets people hyped:
truncated, hypnotizing songs that are as
funny as they are lip-lickingly horny. Hislatest album, Kirk, debuted at No. 1 on the
Billboard 200, and he had a remarkable
23 songs on the Hot 100 in 2019. This is
what exasperated parents call showing out:
His hits—“Walker Texas Ranger,” “Bop,” the
twice-Grammy-nominated “Suge”—operate
on the same frequency, around two and a half
minutes each. On most songs he starts rap-
ping immediately, but if it were possible to
rap before the 0:00 mark, he’d probably try
it. Other rappers land somewhere between
methodical and wild, but DaBaby is both: the
mechanical bull and its rider.
You get the sense he enjoys being in con-
trol. He liked the clothes selected for this
photo shoot, for example. But he wanted
them to fit tighter, hugging his muscles, as
if to test the tensile strength of the designer
threads. At one point a handler shows him
something on a cell phone, asking him to
approve it. He looks down for a moment and
rubs his chin: “That work, yeah.” There is
something stately about the way he twists his
rings and moves my recorder when he thinks
the sound might not be clear enough.
“To say the least, it’s been a successful year,”
he says, leaning in closer to the recorder. “I’m
not taken back by it, though. At all.”
The dirty secret of DaBaby is that he is
the architect of all his success—he’s as good
at presenting himself as a rapper you want
to tell all your friends about as he is at rap-
ping. Over a 12-month span, he’s released
two albums, guested on a half-dozen other
hit songs, performed on Saturday Night
Live, and sent the internet into a state of
dry heat. It’s almost like he appeared out of
nowhere, arriving fully formed: immediately
good, immediately likable, immediate hits.
Along with Jetsonmade, one of his produc-
ers, he’s become famous for making music
with constant punch lines in every direction,
and for making a lot of it. One year there was
no DaBaby; the next year there was DaBaby
all the time, popping up in a track from Post
Malone or J. Cole or Chance the Rapper,
finessing their songs from right underneath
their noses.
He’s particularly averse to old ways of
doing things. In 2019 he was told that it
would be a bad idea to release two consecu-
tive albums in the same calendar year...and
then he did it anyway. “What the majority
would have done was just continue to ride
the wave,” he tells me. “I was the hottest
artist, I was featuring [with] everybody.
I’m like, no, I got to jump into the album
right now.” He’s referring to Kirk, which
was released this past September. He was
advised to pull back; he wanted to double
down. He recorded it on the road, while he
was still touring his label debut, Baby on
Baby, released just six months earlier. “It
just solidified how strong a hold I had,” he
says. “None of (text continued on page 90 )