Dugg’s also got a great little sonic signature: He whistles on his track intros. 2, the mixtape that he released back in March, Dugg collaborates with Detroit underground fixtures like Babyface Ray and Bandgang Masoe, and most of the songs hover around the two-minute mark. But in a lot of ways, Dugg is a pure product of the Detroit underground - a yammering wiseass who excels over cheap, tinny digital basslines. Dugg, like Baby, does a lot of sing-rapping and uses a lot of Auto-Tune. He connected with Lil Baby after shooting dice with him, and he’s been signed to Baby’s 4PF label and to Collective Music Group, the label run by Memphis rap godfather and previous Yung Joc collaborator Yo Gotti, since last year. Two of them feature 42 Dugg.ĭugg released his first mixtape and scored a couple of regional underground viral hits in 2018. In fact, there are six Lil Baby tracks on the Hot 100 right now. This week, “The Bigger Picture” remains in the top 10, while “We Paid,” more of a slow-building hit, has climbed up to #18. Last week, “ The Bigger Picture,” Lil Baby’s thoughtful and striking standalone protest song, debuted at #3 on the Hot 100. As I write this, My Turn is spending its fourth week at #1 on the Billboard albums chart Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways was not quite rough or rowdy enough to dethrone it. My Turn came out in early March, and it’s showing serious staying power, overshadowing albums from Lil Baby’s peers like Gunna and Lil Uzi Vert and DaBaby. Right now, Lil Baby might be the biggest rapper in the world. There’s something profoundly satisfying about the tension-and-release dynamics of “We Paid,” the way it builds up to the hook - “yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah we paid.” In the video, Baby and Dugg and friends burn rubber in expensive cars around some woodsy and secluded neighborhood, looking cool as hell. Both of them gather steam and force as they keep rapping. Dugg raps about spending money on himself. Baby raps about spending money on his friends. They both talk a whole lot of shit on “We Paid,” and their voices weave in and out of each other, finding a hypnotic call-and-response groove. 42 Dugg and Lil Baby are complementary rappers - two deceptively gifted technical stylists whose flows are both catchy and intricate. The minimalism of “We Paid” works for it. But sometime in the last few weeks, I’ve figured out that I love “We Paid.” A lot of people love “We Paid.” The first 10 or 15 times I heard it, I probably barely noticed. It’s a spacious, casual song: Some light lyrical flexing, a few drum hits, piano hits and synth tones deployed quietly and effectively. On first listen, “We Paid” sounded like one more vaguely melodic slow-creep Atlanta trap song in a world full of them. Lil Baby, 42 Dugg’s collaborator on the song, had just released the stuffed album My Turn, and he hadn’t stopped cranking out guest verses. When “We Paid” hit YouTube early in May, it was not an event. He also admits that he likes “We Paid.” How could he not? Everybody likes “We Paid.” In a video posted in response to that 42 Dugg line, Joc flashes a big wad of hundreds at the camera. He hosts a morning radio show in Atlanta, and he’s on one of the VH1 Love & Hip-Hop reality shows. And Joc is presumably not broke, at least in the way that I understand the term. In the first line of the snowballing smash “We Paid,” the tiny, squeaky-voiced Detroit rapper 42 Dugg invokes the fleeting nature of the motorcycle dance: “Before I go broke like Joc, I’ma fuck with that dog like Vick.”Ĥ2 Dugg is not the first person to rap about Yung Joc going broke Gucci Mane said something similar on the 2012 Future collab “ Fuck The World,” when Joc had only just dropped off the charts. These days, Joc’s name is once again in a hit single, but it’s not in the way he might hope. Earlier this year, footage of Joc driving for a ride-share app went viral. Yung Joc went on to rap on a #1 T-Pain hit in 2007, but he hasn’t had a charting single since the 2011 Yo Gotti/Stuey Rock collab “I Know What She Like,” which peaked at #91 on the R&B chart. “It’s Goin’ Down” was a huge hit that peaked at #3 on the Hot 100.
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