Las Vegas sells escape. Baby Keem’s ‘CA$INO’ sells survival

No city in the world retails fantasy like Las Vegas. It’s a 24/7 desert mirage of neon haze and endless champagne bubbles. The illusion breathes on casino tables — oxygen pumping, drinks never-ending and windows to the outside world nowhere in sight.

From a marketing standpoint, Sin City thrives on hyper-hedonistic stereotypes. Its catchphrase is simple, believable to a fault and evergreen:What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

For rapper Baby Keem, though, what happened — better yet, what he survived — in Las Vegas didn’t just follow him home. It followed him well into adulthood. CA$INO is the Grammy winner’s first album in nearly five years — the follow-up to 2021’s The Melodic Blue. The album is heavy, but far from one long note.

When Kendrick Lamar (Keem’s frequent collaborator and cousin) hops on “Good Flirts” and Too $hort on “$ex Appeal,” their verses — and even Keem’s enjoyment on “Birds & The Bees” — serve as push-and-pull mechanisms between vulnerability and vice. Keem doesn’t find shame in holding on to grief because he’s cleared space for everything else to sit beside it. CA$INO is an oxymoron. It’s not a high-roller event. Rather, CA$INO documents growing up in the shadows of one.

The project, originally named after his mother, marks Keem’s most personal to date. That’s intentional.

“My grandma passed away last year, same month. So it’s … a celebration tonight for her,” Keem said last week at a Los Angeles listening party for the album. “I wish she was able to be here, but I think she’s here in spirit. I know my grandma’s proud. I know my family, they’re in the room. They’re proud. My mom’s not able to be here tonight, but I hope she’s watching.”

At 11 tracks, the album is purposely slim. With records like “I am not a Lyricist” and “No Blame,” CA$INO isn’t a flex project. It’s a full-blown reckoning with family at the center. It’s not about gambling. Unless, of course, one is speaking of gambling with our own lives. It is about odds, however. Emotional odds and survival odds. The odds of growing up in a city where spectacle is the chief export — and not being swallowed by it — are slim.

For a lot of people, “home” is a complex topic. The majority of life is centered there. You love there. You grieve. You fight there. You barely survive there. Keem’s astonishment of even being able to rap about the city and what it did to his family is palpable, if not refreshingly and painfully honest.

“They don’t call it Sin City for nothing,” Keem raps. “Either you jumpin’ off a building cause you’re broke or you f–kin’.”

Later in the same verse, Keem opens up about Vegas’ role in the fracturing of his family dynamic, in particular, his mother. Poverty at every turn. Vices — like drugs, alcohol and prostitution — are available in surplus. It is “Sin City,” after all. 

By Keem’s own admission, wolves raised him in “that dirty desert.” But the lyrics matter less than the trauma they carry. Keem raps with the terror of a child who was nearly lost to the system because that’s exactly who and what he was. “My grandma gave me a keyboard when I was 12/ Connie got me out the group home when I was 6,” Keem raps. “Too many alcoholics around when grandma went to jail/ I was sure I wouldn’t be found, should’ve stayed with Jarrell.”

“I am not a Lyricist” would be the album’s emotional centerpiece if it didn’t end with “No Blame.”

Motherly odes are part of rap’s emotional fabric. With “No Blame,” Keem instantly places his name in the conversation. Much like “Lyricist,” understanding that it’s adult Keem giving a voice to his vulnerable, younger self makes it a far more emotional audio experience. James Blake’s background vocals are haunting. Keem’s lyrics about his mother place their strained bond on front street. It’s a different universe away from Las Vegas’ famed “strip.” This was Keem’s home, held together by broken promises and values.

Yet, at the root of the pain, “No Blame” is a son trying to protect a mother who could never protect herself. 

“I could never shame you, mama/ Smokin’ cigarettes in that house made it haunted/ Skeleton in the closet, spent my birthday running from it/ How you pregnant with a Xanax in your stomach?” Keem raps.“I’m wishin’ change upon us/ Broken change and bringin’ pain, you still gon’ break your promise/ That you made me in jail before you had Mikeal that summer/ I was still a baby, mama/ My daddy disappeared, how you neglect your baby mama?”

“No Blame” is accountability minus the self-flagellation — trauma without the theatrics. Reflection over revenge. It’s a laudable refusal to villainize his family while still explicitly naming the harm he endured, and it works brutally well on CA$INO. Keem grew up in a city where “escape” is marketed, but is hardly accessible. Bright lights mask private turmoil well here. Keem’s torture isn’t cinematic. It’s lived in, emotional scars and all. It’s quiet. His vulnerability is reluctant and earned — shaped in the precise illusion only Las Vegas can manufacture.

“It’s not like I’m elusive, or I’m trying to be gimmicky,” Keem said, addressing his yearslong absence at last week’s listening party. “It’s just real-life s— I go through every day.”

In the nearly half-decade between projects, Keem experienced life, rose petals and thorns alike. Processing grief doesn’t come with a time limit. It’s all based on when the weight of it all no longer becomes just a weight. Purposeful retreat gave CA$INO its depth — and Keem the freedom to wade as far into his memory and emotions as he needed. Trauma as corporate branding, this is not. “No Blame” and “Lyricist” are examples of a survivor who sat with life long enough to understand it.

Despite Las Vegas’ tourism concerns, the house figures to remain the winner. Anything opposite means a complete overhaul of the city’s identity and infrastructure. Vegas erected an empire based on an idea of temporary reprieve. Baby Keem’s CA$INO has a foundation rooted in the complete opposite. This is life away from the Strip.

The music doesn’t spin a roulette wheel. Keem counts costs and lists losses on this project. It honors survivors and the grief that comes with breathing. In Sin City, amnesia is marketed as opulence. Keem understands the value of reality. If you’re measuring by Vegas spectacle, Keem’s honesty is unprofitable and unpolished.

Las Vegas is more than the MGM, Aria, or Wynn. It’s more than the city where Tupac Shakur died, where Evander Holyfield lost parts of his ear, thanks to Mike Tyson, and where Elvis Presley was “enslaved.” Henry Ruggs III’s football career ended there. Keem’s gamble isn’t fame. It’s not even honesty. It’s legacy.

In an American Atlantis that showed him just how easy it is for a person to disappear — into addiction, poverty and silence — Baby Keem did perhaps the most defiant thing imaginable. He documented it all.

The real risk was never Keem stepping away. The risk was his testimony.

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