Baby Keem Hits the Jackpot on Ca$ino.  

Benjamin Kenyon  

Rap/Hip-Hop Journalist  

Las Vegas emcee, producer, and auto-crooner, Baby Keem, released his second studio album, Ca$ino, this past Friday, Feb 20. With the project, Keem makes it clear that the five-year hiatus since his last full-length project, The Melodic Blue, was spent refining his skills and making a project that truly showcases his repertoire. The title, Ca$ino, is, of course, not random. Keem’s family moved from Long Beach, CA, to Las Vegas in hopes of a better life when he was just two years old. He shows on the album that the ultimate tourist attraction can be rather damaging to the people who actually live there, underscoring this point with typical Las Vegas and casino imagery contrasted against his own stories of his life in the city.  

The album, worked on by a largely different production team than previous records, shows Keem refining the areas he excelled at before while introducing a number of new sonic and lyrical elements. All over the record are new flows, new implementations of autotune, and a newfound introspection that was vaguely present on past releases but is now front and center. Keem said it best himself on the track, “Circus Circus Free$tyle,” “I’m a genre-bender and I’m comin out of broken home.” Keem executes these different genres rather seamlessly, delivering just as effectively on the album’s various pop, r&b, and rap tracks. He makes those labels feel reductive.  

The album has a number of standouts despite its slight 36-minute runtime. The song “Ca$ino” begins with the sound of a jackpot being hit before abruptly transitioning into a rage-inspired instrumental. After the end of the first verse, Keem introduces the album’s first mid-song beat switch, a Keem signature throughout his discography. Throughout the Cardo-produced track (one of the few previous Keem collaborators who makes an appearance on the album), Keem’s energy is dialed all the way up, allowing him to toe the line between self-reflective lyrics and flexing his new level of success on a dime, without skipping a beat.   

Frequent Keem collaborator and cousin Kendrick Lamar has two strong features on the project, coming on “Good Flirts” and “House Money,” each track allowing Kendrick to show completely different sides of himself, a versatility the cousins have in common. Too $hort of “Blow the Whistle” fame has the album’s best feature on the west coast influenced “$ex Appeal.” The instrumental contains an inexplicable timeless quality, like it could have appeared on a number of records 20 years ago (in a good way).  

“Circus Circus Free$tyle” shows Keem at his most confident. The track has three distinct sections, broken up by two beat switches, and works as a display of Keem’s ability to tackle any instrumental thrown his way. “Had to watch my momma cry / while my house got colonized” is in the same verse that ends with “[explicit] caveman with the way I rap / booya booga wooga ooga ooga waga waga waga wah,” and it somehow doesn’t come across as jarring.  

Most of the album touches on Keem’s upbringing and private life in some way, but the outro, “No Blame,” is the most overt in its approach. The song is an ode to Keem’s mother, whom he has always referred to as being absent without providing extensive details pre-Ca$ino. Keem spends the runtime of the track explaining to his mother that, despite her shortcomings, he doesn’t blame her due to the turbulent circumstances she dealt with before and during his life. “No Blame” is the most mature song on Keem’s most mature album and works as a perfect conclusion to the project.   

Ca$ino’s announcement came just seven days before the album’s release. The ensuing rollout was brief but extremely effective. Over the week, Keem released a three-part series of insightful promotional documentaries providing glimpses into Keem’s previously enigmatic upbringing. Keem had made references to his past here and there on previous records, but the Booman shorts bring us into his world. Camcorder footage of an infant Keem and family, behind-the-scenes of Ca$ino, and interviews with family and friends are split-screened against one another and set the tone for the project. One clip from Booman II, the second installment of the series, shows a young Keem dancing in the car to Ludacris’ “Move [explicit]”. In Booman lll Keem is presented his first Grammy award by Ludacris himself. This full-circle moment is what Ca$ino is all about. Booman III touches on the passing of Keem’s grandmother, a formative event that Keem often references on the album on songs like “Ca$ino”, saying, “I hit the 95 when grandma died to get some closure.” Ca$ino is a celebration of how far Keem has made it already. It often comes across as bittersweet, with Keem reflecting on the moments in his life that made him who he is today and not forgetting those moments despite the 180 his life has taken. Keem has hit the ultimate jackpot, but not without losing along the way.