How did “Slide” come to be? First, the beat comes in: it’s some long-lost ‘80s dance loop, peppered with firework sound effects and funky guitar licks; the harsh lights of a crowd of emergency vehicles flash in time with the groove. Then, 27-year-old Detroit rapper Sada Baby, a supervillain hulking in full orange, emerges into the night from the back of an ambulance, gets on the mic, and starts dancing.
At first, you have to wonder: what is this? “Slide” doesn’t have the type of beat rappers usually like to rap over; it’s too dancey, too up-tempo, too goofy. But Sada floats across it like it’s nothing. As he ramps up his rapping, it seems like something’s going to unravel, but Sada just keeps shimmying, maintaining his footwork, and barreling over the beat. From the jump, he has his crew doing something like the “Thriller” dance between some burning trash cans. After two minutes, he’s maniacally winding back and forth and yelling gun threats at you, and he’s not even sweating.
In the first five days of February, based solely on Sada Baby’s personal promo, this gem of a music video hit YouTube’s Trending page and racked up a million views. Comb through his social media over the past year, and you’ll find a steady stream of dozens of loosies that follow this same formula: he’ll pick a high-energy beat, maybe link up with a Detroit rapper or two, dance and rap his ass off in some wildly-entertaining video, release it, and move on to the next one. The first of his songs to go big like this was early 2018’s “Bloxk Party”, the breakout moment for the Detroit scene he champions — it seems like a standard street-rap music video, with dozens of local faces huddled in a kitchen to grimace and flex at the camera, until Sada starts doing the robot, rattling off inventive punchlines about Finnish NBA players (“I ain’t never had time for no arguments / big-ass shotgun look like Lauri Markannen”), and fluidly rolling his shoulders through the party.
Nobody else has this much fun in music videos. There’s a recognizable ‘Detroit sound’ evident in Sada and his peers — ominous piano loops, Bay Area-adjacent flows that find bouncy pockets just off the beat — but he supercharges everything with enough energy to make it his own. He’s a master of the build, raising the stakes and escalating his verses in intensity until they explode into a grunted ad-lib — HUUNNGH! — that feels like he’s personally stomping on your grave as he snarls it. Even his voice is disrespectful, landing somewhere between a school bully and The Wicked Witch of Detroit.
Bartier Bounty dropped in January 2019 as the first mixtape to capitalize on the viral success of “Bloxk Party”, and it’s a great example of Sada Baby’s talent for being naturally entertaining. It lasts over an hour, with its only features provided by Detroit’s Drego on “Bloxk Party” and Atlanta’s Hoodrich Pablo Juan on the intro, but it never lapses into the sort of bland filler we’ve come to expect from most of the underground trap rappers cranking out a few projects a year to keep interest up. He raps; occasionally, he sings, too, and he’s got enough star power to pull off lovesick ballads like “Aunty Melody” without you batting an eye. Each track comes with its own laundry list of obscure sports references and shit-talking quotables. In Sada’s world, your kids love him like Frozen; he’s Gene Simmons with it; he’s got someone tech-savvy with him, so he can use Google Maps to find your house; his gun will change your mood like a Snickers. Aside from a hilarious take on “Ice Ice Baby” that no other rapper would even attempt, his next project, September’s Whoop Tape, is more of the same, and that’s a good thing. Great Sada Baby songs are like NASA rocket launches; even if you’ve heard “Back End” a thousand times, it’s still fundamentally satisfying to watch him ignite and take off.
He’s a phenomenon, which makes it all the more surprising that he hasn’t really established himself as a star outside of his region. (He doesn’t need to, of course — his intensely-local music is great and has a huge audience with or without reaching that massive level — but with his outsized charisma, it feels like he should have by now.) Sada Baby has over half a million Instagram followers, but if you open up a lesser-known video of his, many of the comments might still be from alumni of the local high school it’s taped at. Besides the momentary success of “Bloxk Party”, which showed up in all of the usual channels that rising rap stars find themselves in, he hasn’t enjoyed the kind of national attention afforded to his fellow Detroit rapper and former label head Tee Grizzley; Sada mostly collaborates with other prolific city natives in his orbit, and they see even less shine nationally.
The first major rapper outside of Detroit to try and bring its upstart scene to the masses was bubblegum-trap bigshot Lil Yachty, an unexpected Southern peer to the raw, menacing talents of the Midwestern city. In June of last year, the carefree Atlanta native made a tweet that likely introduced many of his fans to the names of underground Detroit’s biggest rappers for the first time, announcing: “Before lil boat 3 I’m dropping a “ d to the a “ mixtape featuring tee grizzly [sic], sada baby, drego & Beno & sum atl natives.. yup detroit gone feel it, atlanta gone feel it”. D to the A, named after an intense back-and-forth single released by Yachty and Grizzley in 2017, has yet to materialize as a full mixtape. But in early January, Lil Yachty and Sada Baby coordinated the surprise release of collaborative song “SB5”, the latter’s biggest exposure yet to the kind of wider audience he seems primed for.
Sada pretty clearly eclipses Yachty here. Trading bars helps keep Detroit rap uniquely refreshing — Drego’s exchanges with Sada are half the fun of “Bloxk Party”, and Grizzley’s domineering on “From the D to the A” helped light an unexpected fire under Yachty after he’d only rarely gone so hard at pure rapping previously. On “SB5”, Sada and Yachty alternate over a creeping, shadowy instrumental that lets the former’s understated delivery shine; both of them have striking presence, but Sada’s flow fits especially on this beat. “SB5” is proof that he can go up against just about anyone and still make himself the center of attention. He’s a fully-formed fireball of charisma, one who almost seems restrained by any limits on his following.
In that sense, he reminds me of another breakout regional star with “Baby” in his name. I’m from Charlotte; in summer 2017, I first watched the video for local rapper Deniro Farrar’s “The Dealer”, and as soon as DaBaby entered frame for his feature, I could sense that he’d be big someday. Besides a city-wide posse cut called “#NewCharlotte” that had become a minor hit a few years earlier, the city’s thriving rap scene didn’t get any national attention, but that couldn’t stop DaBaby. He would release more and more music over the next 18 months, growing into his bombastic personality and eventually hitting the viral news cycle for an altercation at a local Walmart. Once James Rico and his N.C.-based Reel Goats production crew, who made a name for themselves directing videos for Farrar like “The Dealer”, got fully behind DaBaby and started making goofier and wackier videos for him, everything was set in motion for his rise to international stardom. By the end of last year, DaBaby had racked up more Billboard Hot 100 hits (20) than any other artist in 2019, just about everyone I knew had heard “Suge” or seen the dance in the video, he was making cameos in SNL skits, and he had become, more or less, a household name.
Could the same thing happen to Sada Baby? Maybe not. But if so, he’s already well on his way there. He’s constantly releasing music and videos, making every release into an event. It’s a testament to the devotion of his fanbase that his last two mixtapes, including January 1st’s Brolik, have only been released on mixtape sites like DatPiff — not on any of the usual streaming services — and have still spread like wildfire among those who know where to look. He punches in verse after verse, releases song after song, and puts out video after video showing off his unparalleled run. He’s on a tear; he’s in his prime.
And he has his whole city behind him. Detroit producer Helluva, the architect of the city’s jumpy, piano-laced sound, has production credits all over Sada’s discography, including on more experimental offerings like “Slide”. Well-respected Detroit rap veterans like Danny Brown have called him the city’s best. If you go back to the “Bloxk Party” video after spending a few months obsessing over the ins and outs of the Detroit scene, like I did, you’ll be able to pick out other promising local rappers, like BandGang Lonnie Bands, having just as much fun as Sada is, right alongside him, as he announces: “I will / Fuck the party up with my dance moves.” There’s a good chance that, with his brazen, idiosyncratic energy, he never will become a fixture on the charts, but whether he hits the big-leagues or not, Sada Baby’s music presents an entire community of artists coalescing around one larger-than-life personality. That alone is something to behold.
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