Nerd rap stopped being popular when hip hop took a turn toward authenticity. It could hurt a street rep to be in the basement playing videogames and watching basketball rather than out with a gang. That turn led to embarrassing results: almost all “true” rappers started to sound the same. With BabyTron’s Bin Reaper, tables are turned: now nerd rap is leading the way.
A part of Detroit’s group ShittyBoyz, BabyTron made an obvious choice beginning a solo career. Barely out of teens, he sounds just like a guy playing Play Station in the middle of a gun fight in the trap. His flow is so fast as if he wants to record as many verses as possible until the big guys come and kick him out of the booth. They sure have something to worry about. Despite appearances, BabyTron can be menacing and arrogant in his music.
Haha, Shawn Michaels I’m a heartbreaker
I'm just chillin’ like a villain feel like Darth Vader
Been scoring OT I’m the star player
Put a bullet in his atrium, fuck a heart grazer
Long forgotten actors, Amazon card scams, videogames, Telegram — every mass culture junk that any “true” rapper would find unacceptable in his lyrics slides into BabyTron’s verses and get recycled to great results. For a rapper who can pull up in a scooter on a parking lot full of hellcats, he understands what most rappers don’t: copycatting the others will only make you dull, not original. He’s having fun making music. The beats he uses are not something one can dismiss as generic. Helluva is responsible at least for some of the production, and most of the beats remind you of 1980s disco BabyTron’s mother could forget to turn off.
Every other line on Bin Reaper has a punchline, and it successfully places BabyTron in the line of great comedy rappers from Gucci Mane to Cash Kidd (also from Detroit). It’s no surprise that the album’s light humor and metaphorical punchlines sounds so refreshing among grim tales from current roast of rappers whose songs are serious to the degree that compared to them even New York Times looks like Sunday strips.
It’s hard to tell where BabyTron will go from here. Yet this album already proves that Detroit rap is on the rise.
