If you thought blogs were dead, you must not have been paying attention to Baby Osamaa’s SoundCloud page, where the South Bronx-raised rapper has been erratically documenting her early 20s in real time. One day that means breaking down her Canal Street boosting process in a mutant flow, and the next jacking the Griselda swag for a message about how she’s “got a heart under these double-D titties.” That means a rhymeless Auto-Tuned rant about trying to crowdfund her next tape, flipping melodramatic Slayword-style pluggnb into a ballad about how much she loves her dog, and then recounting conversations she had with her grandfather over new-age jerk. That means arbitrary Drake covers and Max B homages, smooth ballads on smashing cougars and dirty macking. That means turning her music into an audio Facebook Marketplace to find an affordable apartment—“HELP i need a 1 bed room apartment dog friendly no credit check in ny”—and go off on institutional barriers: “What is credit?/What the fuck is taxes?”
As you can imagine, that straight-from-the-brain-to-the-booth madness has been a pretty hard thing for Baby Osamaa to condense into a single mixtape, but, in just seven tracks that feel more like snippets, On Tha Run gets the job done. By spinning up nostalgia for a kind of luxurious rap stardom that barely exists anymore, Baby Osamaa comes up with a sketch of what her own big-budget major label debut would look like. She goes about that by reenvisioning herself as a member of the YMCMB JV team, bringing the digital extravagance of ’09 Tha Bizness type beats down to Earth with the realness of an unashamed poster.
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Take “6 Figure”: The orchestral bounce of the intro might make you picture Osamaa flying down the Miami waterfront in a speedboat with DJ Khaled, and then, as the tinny litefeet rhythm hits, she upends that opulence by using her husky Wayne flow to talk pulling up in Hondas and being “on that 2 train, finna’ go see my fine thing.” Same goes for her for-the-hell-of-it Rick Ross remix “Ashton” (it has been taken off streaming services by the powers that be, but corporate decisions won’t stop me from treating it as canon), which rewires his larger-than-life radio hit into fuzzy dating memories that feel like learning about a couple’s toxic dynamic through IG Stories. She’s straddling the line between being in love with the inaccessible glamour of the era and clowning on it.
On Tha Run’s satirical side reminds me of the cynical humor that used to be more common in underground rap back in the 2000s, when it seemed like the major label rappers were eating good. Think of Thirstin Howl III’s tongue-in-cheek brags on “I Still Live With My Moms,” or Strick on Masta Ace’s “F.A.Y.,” getting in his feelings about how much richer Lil’ Bow Wow was: “He prolly got his own chef and a fuckin’ hot tub.” Baby Osamaa isn’t as over-the-top, but on “Couch Surfer,” when she croons through a thick layer of Auto-Tune about “couch surfing all day,” it has that fourth-wall-breaking honesty, plus a hint of sarcasm in how she makes it sound like a flex.
At the same time, she’s pushing her melodies to delirious heights, pulling from 2010s Atlanta in a way that, in a landscape with so many by-the-book imitators, sounds refreshingly messy: I like the imperfect cracks in her Astronaut Status-style dry-mouthed wails of “Paparazzi,” and how the unpolished coarseness of her voice scuffs up the overly cute Top 40 nostalgia of “The Last Dance.” Best of all is “Miami Zoes,” a charmingly ragged, dollar-bin version of a melodic Wayne pop hit with a randomly repurposed Sage the Gemini lyric and shiesty dating ethics that deserves to be sung with your chest.
And, funny enough, despite On Tha Run owing so much to Wayne stylistically, the YMCMB star I thought of most often was Nicki Minaj. There’s this pre-fame Nicki interview I think about sometimes, where she’s sitting on a mechanical pony acting mildly annoyed by the interviewer’s formulaic questions. “Step your dick up right now,” she says to him, half-joking. “Surprise me. Do something crazy, off the wall.” I always thought that impulsive quote captured so much of her ethos: In good times and bad, it excited her to be a part of things that got a rise out of people. I think of Baby Osamaa much in the same way, but coming from a more current perspective. Whether it’s her harsh flows or the way she throws out lines like, “Keep talkin’ crazy, get fucked in your butt, nigga” just because she can, she’s determined to do stuff you’d never call boring. The days of the Young Money lifestyle are gone, might as well be raw as fuck.