Fed Baby’s

Fed Baby’s

There’s a level on which Moneybagg Yo and YoungBoy Never Broke Again seem like irreconcilable opposites. The former is a playful, tightly metered technician from Memphis whose stark—and frequent—moments of introspection are often disguised as variations on his innumerable club hits. The latter, by contrast, is a demonstrative bleeding heart from Baton Rouge, his emotions wailed and barked and otherwise telegraphed across his songs, which are often referred to as “pain music.” But each rapper rose to fame through saturation rather than judicious planning. Their collaborative mixtape, Fed Baby’s, understands this to be true, and documents two livewire MCs working out their creative partnership in real time. While Fed Baby’s sometimes leverages these differences in style to compelling ends, it also nudges each artist into the other’s territory—especially when Bagg is coaxed into YoungBoy-esque harmonization, as he is on the coy “Preliminary Hearing.” Meanwhile, YoungBoy, who is prone to breaking from long melodic runs into purposefully jagged runs of staccato rapping, borrows from Bagg the poised, seesaw delivery that hears him become almost metronomic. See “Contempt of Court,” where competing impulses to be there for his son and to check out of life forever are coiled so tightly together that a listener would be forgiven for missing the fissure between them. In addition to the relationship between the two artists as individuals, Fed Baby’s is a study of the subtle misalignment of Memphis and Baton Rouge’s rap scenes. While Bagg and his contemporaries are led by the drums, fashioning their taunts and missives around irrepressible rhythms, Louisianans like YoungBoy have yanked their songs in more—and more divergent—directions. As in Memphis, modern Baton Rouge rap stems from dance music and club culture. But many YoungBoy tracks have a confrontationally digital feel, the natural evolution of late-’90s Cash Money songs from New Orleans, or are given over fully to their emotionality, leaning on acoustic guitar or piano. Fed Baby’s takes the notion of collaboration far more seriously than sliding two rappers onto a track together.

Other Versions

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada