Lil Baby On The "Fell Off" Talk: "Hip Hop Has Fallen Off — But I'm Hip Hop"

Lil Baby On The “Fell Off” Talk: “Hip Hop Has Fallen Off — But I’m Hip Hop”

Lil Baby is deep into the FRESH press run, and when he sat down with Nessa on HOT 97, the conversation landed on the talk that follows every superstar between albums: the “fell off” chatter. Nessa asked him straight up how he takes it when people say Lil Baby is falling off — and whether it motivates him. His answer flipped the question back on the whole culture.

“I take that on a deeper thing than everybody else,” he said. “‘Cause hip hop has fallen off, but I’m hip hop. So we gotta get together. When they say Baby fell off, it’s whatever — but the main thing, hip hop at an all-time low, and I’m that.” Translation: if his era looks different, he says the genre’s numbers look different — and he’s still the standard it gets measured by. He doubled down a minute later: even if the talk were true, he wouldn’t be mad. “I can’t fall off,” he said, pointing at where he came from.

A big piece of his answer was the internet. Baby said the game has changed completely since he came in — anybody can upload a review now, and the review travels further than the listen. “The thing now is engagement,” he explained. “You’re gonna get the most engagement if you say the Baby album trash. So the hottest thing to do is say the Baby album trash or the Baby fell off.” People who never even played the music run with the content, he said — and because he can see the play for exactly what it is, it doesn’t move him.

Then he left the next generation with the real jewels. Asked for his best advice to an upcoming artist watching him, Baby kept it all the way business: do the right thing with the money. “Save it or multiply it — don’t subtract it,” he said. “If you do the right thing with those heights of money, you could never fall off.” He admitted his own early purchases were “the dumbest” he could have done — the jewelry, the cars — and said the houses he bought in three states and his studio company are the best purchases he ever made.

So here’s where it lands. Baby hears the “fell off” talk and answers with the whole genre: if hip hop is at an all-time low, the man at the top of it says he IS hip hop — and the talk itself is just the hottest engagement play in the game right now. Is he right? Has hip hop fallen off as a culture while he stayed the standard — or is the “fell off” talk just engagement bait, exactly like he said? Drop your take in the comments.

Interview via HOT 97 — Nessa on the Air with Lil Baby. Watch the full conversation in the embed above.