SahBabii Cranks His Surreal Street Rap to 11 On ‘Saaheem’
For a rapper who loves talking about his balls, Sahbabii sounds remarkably mature on his latest.
SahBabii has always rapped like one of the Fooglies from Spy Kids if they had access to Young Thug’s Slime Season mixtape series. He got his start with songs that were airy and colorful, their bouncy melodies cushioning an endless barrage of bizarre wordplay and silly sex puns. Only an artist equally inspired by the late Rich Homie Quan and the Japanese producer Nujabes would think to croon a cloud-rap love song to an anime waifu, like “Anime World,” or interrupt a shootout to have a lover swallow his dick like a bottle of iced tea, as he does on his 2016 breakout single “Pull Up Wit ah Stick.” Though the Atlanta-via-Chicago rapper’s style is heavily indebted to the newly-freed Thugger, projects like 2018’s Squidtastic or 2020’s Barnacles set themselves apart by draping the songs’ love stories, hookups, and gang wars in a in a veil of cool insouciance.
2021’s Do It for Demon—dedicated to his best friend Demon Child, who inspired him to rap more about his life and feelings, and was killed in a shooting earlier that year—signaled a change. Without losing the jokey strangeness of his earlier work, Sah’s raps became more focused and emotional, and his production more brooding, the songs more deeply situated in their surroundings and the lineage of the 27-year-old delivering them. He carries that balancing act of fun and purpose over to his latest project Saaheem, titled after his government name, Saaheem Malik Valdery. It’s a sampler of every side of his personality: the morose, the ribald, the batshit insane. Though Saaheem’s jumpy and triumphant songs sound more like contemporary Atlanta than anything he’s released before, no one is doing it quite like SahBabii.
As ludicrous as his music can be, Sah has been working from a template for the eight years since his 2016 breakout S.A.N.D.A.S: mid-tempo slappers with aqueous rhythms and punchlines delivered with the smoldering remove of the mysterious kid who floats through friend groups in high school. Part of what makes Saaheem so interesting is the way he breaks that mold. Most notably, his sonic palette has changed dramatically, as older names like BasedTJ and his brother T3 have no production on this album: There are no more sleepy synths, chirpy choruses, or cooing anime-girl vocal samples. Nor is it strictly a redux of Demon, which skewed minimal with touches of somber guitar, keyboards, and soft 808s. Saaheem’s sound—spearheaded by at least two producers per song, including Dilip, CashCache, and Evrgrn—is lusher and fuller, calling on more intense drums, staccato piano, and shimmering arrangements that take the bacchanal of Young Thug’s So Much Fun in a more elegant direction. These are stacked walls of sound that either trot by with skittering hi-hats (“Viking,” “All The Way”) or flood the eardrums with beats spacey (“Save It 4 Me Babii”) and maximal (“Sylvan Rd Ridin Down Dill”).
Sah’s ability to stay above the fray is a testament to how his vocals have adapted. Early on, no matter how crazy the bars or flows, he always sounded muted and disaffected, like he just woke up from a four-hour nap and sauntered over to the booth. He’s newly open to stretching and distorting his delivery on Saaheem tracks like the unhinged “Kodak,” a speedy blend of synths and finger snaps that Sah glides through sounding like Young Thug with laryngitis. Just listen to the way his ad libs pop against his bars and the way he elongates the syllables in the word “aphrodisiac.” When he says “Head to toe, I’m double C’s, ain’t average, I earned somethin’/Bullets got gonorrhea in this dick, you play, I burn somethin’,” he’s practically screaming. “Urgent” is a word I’d never previously used to describe a SahBabii song, but these infusions of energy give new depth to Saaheem’s celebrations and tearful reminiscences.
Writing-wise, Sah shifts between short-burst vignettes and touching bits of autobiography that benefit from his new flows and inflections. Opening up about the traumas of street life is a lot to ask of any performer, but it’s gratifying to see his potent style applied to some straightforward storytelling tracks. The brief verse on “Belt Boyz” is dedicated to a moment when T3 and Demon pulled guns on someone who stole Sah’s car. As the Tre Styles of this situation, Sah’s recollection goes from poignant (“We was on the move, I almost got shot in between my eyes”) to defiant by the time the chorus comes around. “Niggas ain’t bad enough/Ain’t put belt to ass enough,” he says with a snarl, absorbing the shock of nearly being taken out with a catchy hook. This grateful attitude dovetails with “1095 Osborne St,” where he catches up with a former fling and his two sons about his successes and fears, and “Workin,” an ode to a work ethic he’s happy to apply to music instead of robbing people or flipping burgers.
There’s more consideration of Sah’s legacy and future on Saaheem, but that doesn’t mean the quotables and one-liners have slowed down. SahBabii pushes his already demented imagination to madcap heights, working in references to old Disney Channel originals, Marine-turned-bank-robber Brian Easley, and chicken restaurant chain Mrs. Winner’s with the gun and sex jokes. In the second verse of “On Film,” he says his lady is so bad, she needs to go stand in the corner. In “Lost All My Feelings”: “My guns got genres, stick rock out, Glock R&B.” His cologne is worth a car note, and his trigger finger is so binary, it’ll rock all your fellas, “no Jigga.” He’s as creative (and horny) as ever, and this newly energetic presentation helps the jokes land even harder. If anything, they’re as much a mission statement as any of the ruminative joints. In the eight years since S.A.N.D.A.S. (and the 13 years since his Chicago drill-influenced debut Pimpin’ Aint Eazy), every SahBabii project has seen him peek further and further out of his shell. Now, he’s popping out like he is on the album’s cover—chest out, lips pursed mid-teeth-suck, wondering how long it’ll take you to see the greatness.
