Blue-gray smoke hangs over Hykeem Jamaal Carter Jr.’s childhood memories. Coming of age in Las Vegas, he had “never seen a hotel without cigarettes.” His mother smoked inside the family’s apartment and on his latest album, “Casino,” the 25-year-old rapper and producer who goes by Baby Keem likens it to living in a haunted house.
All of the great rappers have unforgettable origin stories, told (and retold) in their music. Keem understood this early in his career but it has taken him until now to feel open and skilled enough to pound his own Dickensian tale of hardship, perseverance and extraordinary opportunity into a pointed piece of art.
“Casino,” released in February, almost five years after his debut, brings together traditional storytelling and the more impulsive outburst style associated with artists like Playboi Carti. It peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard 200, and starting this week, he’s taking it on the road, touring theaters and ballrooms in North America and Europe.
Keem first emerged as a teenager in 2019 with the piquant self-produced hit “Orange Soda,” and has been a rising star, if a hazy one. “The Melodic Blue,” his debut, is a maximalist, chest-thumping display of youthful ambition and its single “Family Ties” won a Grammy for best rap performance. That song featured his cousin, Kendrick Lamar, who has helped draw attention but whose halo has also sometimes threatened to overshadow him.
“There’s curiosity to my story,” Keem said. “People have these opinions on how I came about.”
But criticism of his songs or sidelong glances at his rise don’t bother him. He’s made music “to impress” only one person: Kendrick.
Waiting in the green room at Webster Hall in Manhattan before a sold-out surprise performance in early March, Keem rattled off the words Vegas conjured for him: “Casinos, prostitution, drugs, stabbings, meth, addiction.” In unflashy designer jeans and a hoodie, he was surprisingly tall and often flashed a wide smile. But his tone was serious. “Somewhere in all that is family,” he said.
His mother was young when she had Keem, her first born, and she struggled with substance abuse. His grandmother, a substitute schoolteacher, was a more dependable caregiver. “Imagine having an older lady as your best friend,” he said of their bond. There was love and unmistakable material lack. “My grandma would collect cans out the trash can for money. We’d walk home, sell cans. You kind of get the why. You don’t have to ask why. You’re living the why.”
The arrival of his brother when Keem was around 9 years old seemed like a positive change in his family’s fortunes: “I got three years of, like, a normal childhood where I got to have a brother, and go outside and play, and then come back to stability.” But the idyll was temporary, and Keem and his brother were later split up, part of a pattern of family discord.
A colorful cast of aunts and uncles made up the backdrop of his early life and adolescence, including his uncle Gerrell, who rapped under the name Khaotic Lyricist. Making music of his own, Keem looked up to him.
Before a homecoming dance when Keem was 14 or 15, Gerrell tied his nephew’s tie. “It was like the last moment I had with him,” Keem said. In December 2015, Gerrell was struck and killed by a truck. “I remember the news report and you could see his clothes still in the street,” he said. His uncle had been coming from a casino.
The loss was shattering and transformative. “I felt lost,” Keem said. “I knew I had to be somewhat of a man,” which meant trying to control his emotions. “I’d go in my room and cry.”
At the funeral, fighting nerves and tears, Keem lost the thread of his prepared eulogy and began recalling basketball games played with his uncle. Stumbling through his thoughts, he caught sight of one of his family members. It was Lamar, Keem’s mother’s cousin, whom he had not seen in years. Lamar gazed at him intently.
“Watching Keem speak at the funeral displayed the making of a man,” Lamar wrote in an email. “It reminded me of all the realities I faced which shaped who I am today. I watched Keem carry the burdens of everyone’s grief, including his own, all while maintaining the dignity and honor of his uncle. We’re merely a reflection of our leaders, and Keem led the family to a place of love, compassion, and closure. Another level of respect was my gratitude.”
A few days after the funeral, Lamar texted Keem. His life was about to change.
THE FIRST TIME Dave Free, Lamar’s friend and longtime business partner, became aware of Keem was after Gerrell’s funeral, when the rapper sent over some of his teenage cousin’s beats. “It was very cryptic, but Kendrick’s like that when sharing music,” Free said.
Lamar didn’t reveal the family ties until later, when he shared another song, this time with Keem rapping on it, in a high-pitched voice with a style reminiscent of Lil Uzi Vert, Kanye West, Playboi Carti and a little bit of Lamar himself. What did Free think? “It’s kinda hard,” he replied.
Keem was dedicated to making music, and moved from Las Vegas to Los Angeles in search of a more fertile scene, and then invited friends and collaborators to stay with him. The songwriter and producer Scott Bridgeway met Keem online, playing video games like “Call of Duty”; earlier this year, Bridgeway won his first Grammy for his work on Lamar and SZA’s No. 1 hit “Luther.”
Keem is enmeshed in the apparatus that supported Lamar through multiple Grammy wins and the unprecedented cultural event that was Lamar’s war of words with Drake, culminating with his Super Bowl performance.
“For me, it felt like a sport,” Keem said of the beef. “I was so confident that sometimes you forget to be proud.”
Support from Lamar and Free (and the creative agency they co-founded, pgLang) has shown him a vibrant creative path. “I was just happy to be around,” Keem said. “Knowing that the greatest artist of all time, in my opinion, is a fan of my work and what I can do — all cousins aside, all everything aside — that gives me the most confidence in the world.”
Despite that confidence, he recorded his debut album with something to prove. The production on “The Melodic Blue” is often unstable and somewhat indulgent, and he often sounds most comfortable delivering wisecracks and bravado.
The album didn’t “come from the purest place,” he said, unlike “Casino,” which was intentionally built from fewer, more sturdy ideas. He wanted “storytelling and bangers.”
By focusing on narrative, he knew he would invite comparisons to his cousin, which is why he had avoided it before: “I don’t want it to seem like I’m just trying to make Kendrick music.”
When he worked with West (who now goes by Ye) on his album “Donda,” Keem saw firsthand the quilt-like process Ye uses to weave together not just beats, but lyrics.
“My biggest issue with writing at that point was I couldn’t stay on a topic,” he explained. So he invited a number of rappers to sit with him and talk about craft. Keem gathered techniques: “They’d be like, ‘We working?’ Nah, we’re not working. We just here because I want to talk about what I would do on this beat.”
On “Casino,” the ironically titled “I Am Not a Lyricist” is the most distilled expression of what he learned. “Too many alcoholics around when grandma went to jail / I was sure I wouldn’t be found, should’ve stayed with Gerrell,” he raps over a piano loop.
“I didn’t really want to hide meanings,” Keem said.
KEEM HAS HAD ACCESS to pgLang’s creative framework for “Casino,” and in March, that meant the architects of one of last year’s biggest pop culture moments — the Super Bowl halftime show — were workshopping the particulars of a one-off performance at a 1,500-capacity venue in the East Village.
“To really fit in this dynamic, you have to be a humble, collaborative soul,” Free said. “He comes from very hard times, so he knew super young, just being even around us, that he was in a fortunate situation.”
Keem exercised the morning of the show, jogging in Manhattan just blocks from the building where he’s keeping a pied-à-terre. Two men approached to share their admiration for the new album, but they didn’t overstay their welcome.
Performing live means having to learn how to plan your breaths so that you can emphasize the lines that excite the audience most. Joining his cousin on the Big Steppers tour in 2023 taught Keem how to put on a dynamic show.
He went from not wanting to screw up to “truly feeling like I can do whatever I want onstage,” he said. “A lot of being an opener was like, ‘Damn, do these people actually know who I am?’ But it felt like the fans really understood what I was doing, even if they weren’t all of my fans, necessarily.”
The night before, he’d been at the studio, testing out new sounds that might lead to the next album. As a producer, Keem is full of ideas and isn’t stingy with his opinions. A few years ago, he nearly executive produced an album for Lil Uzi Vert, one of his influences. Keem went through the rapper’s hard drive while Uzi slept, picking out the best unreleased material to construct a complete record around. It didn’t end up happening — the momentum flagged when Keem left for the tour with Lamar. But it’s something Keem would like to do eventually.
“Keem has a lot of relationships behind the scenes with artists,” Free said.
Keem opened his Webster Hall show with “Circus Circus Freestyle,” one of the pugnacious bangers on “Casino,” and the young members of the audience began launching their bodies at one another as Free watched from the soundboard.
The kids especially loved the song’s end, where Keem used a “cave man” flow: “booga wooga ooga ooga,” they shouted along. There’s a perception that his off-kilter humor brings out a lighter side of Lamar on their collaborations, but Keem waved the notion away: Kendrick is less serious than people realize, he said.
Keem kept the performance recreational, eschewing the more emotional songs on “Casino.” At the first moment of quiet between songs, the crowd chanted his name. They knew who he was now, intimately.
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