Baby Keem has two phones, a fact reiterated so often across his discography that it has become a running joke among fans. Those phones likely reinforce some kind of personal and professional binary — a main for everyday life and a burner for the dealings of the streets, or one for rap business and one for private matters, or the Kevin Gates option: "one for the b****es and one for the dough." Whatever the specific reason may be, the assertion telegraphs a friction between lives, a stratified reality in need of a buffer. "Sleep with two phones on my chest / Yesterday I was just broke, today I look sexy and blessed," he once chirped on "booman." Since Keem has become a platinum-certified, Grammy-winning artist, you could consider those thresholds a partition of the past and present, Before Success and After; even more notable in the lyric is the prosperity gospel made manifest, where "broke" and "blessed" are inherent opposites. Nowhere is that ethic more boldly espoused than in Las Vegas, the place Keem grew up, and now the site for an overdue absolution ritual.
In truth, any two-phone bifurcation of life is artificial, and Keem is coming to terms with that tension. In a 2021 interview with Billboard ahead of his breakthrough album The Melodic Blue, the first released on his cousin Kendrick Lamar's pgLang label, he shared a glimpse into one phone, flashing a text from his aunt that read: "I got people calling my phone asking me for money," a sign that Keem was obviously up next but also that the firewall was slipping. Money is at the center of many rap stories, but even more so for one spilling out across the gambling mecca. Several members of Keem's family, including his late mother, Janice, got evicted because they bet their rent, the possibility of hitting it big a more powerful draw than the materiality of ending up on the street.
This is the core conflict of Ca$ino, Keem's first album in four years and his most revealing, evaluating the influence his mother's addictions have had on how he navigates vice and responsibility more broadly. "When I was dyin' for my b****, my ma was sleepin' in a tent / Goin' back and forth to jail, should I bail? Where can I vent?" he raps on the opener. The music treats trap and West Coast rap as crosspieces in his inner scaffolding, overlaying the pleasure-seeking of his rapper id atop the lawless, neon Sodom of his memory. The Melodic Blue was full of teases to this enhanced pathos: "One day, I'll tell you how my life was unfortunate / For now, I'll tell you how fast these Porsches get," Keem rapped on "scapegoats." Temptation called out to him, the seven deadly sins manifesting at every turn as he held his traumatic past at bay: "I gotta see my ceiling with those I trust / I'd rather feed my feelings with those I lust," he sang on "scars." On Ca$ino, the ability of lust to feed his feelings has finally waned. As images from his upbringing well up to the surface, Keem delivers a compact, chaotic, head-turning treatise about your dreams being inextricable from your nightmares, and why cashing in is always easier than cashing out.
Rap is its own kind of gamble, and Keem recognizes his success as a metaphorical jackpot, something he underscores on the album's title track: "I beat the odds, so I'm more prima donna." The energy of his songs has always been nouveau riche, as if flaunting the unlikeliness of his windfall, but also psychically bearing the sweat and sacrifice required to make the climb. For most of his career, that cost has been pushed to the margins of his music: "Baby Keem got issues and money can't solve them," he rapped on 2019's "STATS." Kendrick talks a lot about breaking generational curses, including in the three-part mini-doc Keem released ahead of this album, Booman — and Keem is clearly working on it, though it can be hard to fully reconcile the damage the glitter gulch has done to your psyche when rap both got you out of that hell and feeds all the same impulses. It would be a stretch to compare this album to Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Kendrick's therapy record unpacking his own bruised family history — it isn't nearly as knotty or inward-looking — but they share an intentionality: working through a messy internal audit in hopes of unloading baggage weighing on the spirit. For Keem, that means reckoning with Vegas as an embodiment of social discrepancies. The whiplash of Ca$ino's sequencing, from game-winner's euphoria to the crash of self-destructive ruin, is at least half the point.
Across his three previous albums, Keem has made a kind of mischievous self-indulgence his calling card. His whined flows were imbued with a restlessness and irritability that his lyrics mirrored, accelerating his recognition. Songs like "Baby Keem," "Orange Soda" and "vent" bobbed around with chest-beating gusto, and the underlying thesis was that he was cash-obsessed, gauche and "irresponsible," as he put it on the former. There are songs on Ca$ino that move in the same way, such as "Birds & the Bees" and "Circus Circus Freestyle," but this album also presents a counterpoint: "I'm Keem Wyseem, and if I'm in this b**** then I'm ready to crash out / I'm holding resentment, my mama's so petty, she left me in back at the stash house," he raps on "House Money," zeroing in on an enduring longing for attention.
Ca$ino presents the Baby Keem lore from a new angle, connecting the dots from his crash-outs back to the resentment they sprung from. "Runaway child, sleepin' under highways / Growin' up and goin' on a tirade," he exclaims on "Highway 95 pt. 2." "I am not a Lyricist," the album's literal and figurative centerpiece, roots around in the pent-up memories where that bitterness is stored, building the throughline to an artistic mission statement: "I am not a lyricist / I am just a bastard child, here to experiment / Everything I've written down, just for the temperament / This is me thinkin' out loud for the conspiracists." One of a handful of more pen-focused songs co-written by longtime GOOD Music session consultant CyHi the Prynce, "I am not a Lyricist" is the most sobering performance the artist has ever delivered, using writerly verses to convey that he is not a wordsmith but an impressionist in the midst of an extended, head-clearing tantrum.
I get the sense that Keem is just now working out the sonic language to navigate that expression. As a producer, he is a maximalist post-Kanye beat-maker who considers himself of a class with Metro Boomin and Mike WiLL Made-It, trap legends who helped rebuild pop radio in their image. Those planks are still his baseline, but he furnishes his palate with slow-rolling soul to accommodate the vulnerability of his more solemn moments. Some of his experimentation produces blatant misfires like the insipid "Dramatic Girl," and Ca$ino isn't as multifaceted as The Melodic Blue, which felt technicolor. Still, pulling back grants the opportunity for some levelheaded epiphanies. "Sometimes, I forget that my mama's out existin' / What am I without this government assistance?" he asks on "Highway 95 pt. 2," over bluesy melancholia reminiscent of early Eminem. The blustery, turbulent "No Blame" transforms James Blake's cries on "I Never Learnt To Share" into storm squalls as Keem finds forgiveness for his mom. That is where this was always headed: a funeral pyre amid the whirr of slot machines.
Listening to Ca$ino, as Keem manages the personal fallout of familial gambling addiction, I couldn't help but consider the state of gambling more broadly. It has never been more prevalent, yet tourism to Vegas has cratered, weakening a local economy dependent on the visitors. Meanwhile, online prediction markets, which incentivize anticipating specific outcomes, have turned stake-holding into a decentralized, gamified process without safeguards. (One such platform, Kalshi, gamified the release of Ca$ino itself, allowing users to bet on whether or not the album would debut atop the Billboard 200 or how many pure sales it would log in its opening week.) Rap influencers have become partners pushing the unregulated "forecasts"; where there was once safety glass, it is all so baldly unscrupulous now. On Baby Keem's album, you can hear a kind of cautionary tale for the long-lasting effects of the Strip's seductions. Rap is teeming with the same sinfulness, but Ca$ino demonstrates that its players don't have to be prisoners to the gambler's conceit.
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