Eventually, we all have to find a way to narrate our childhood. Most of us spend our twenties searching for the right story to tell, one that is true to our memories but spacious enough to contain the open futures we wish to inhabit. Finding the right narrative is tough. Its shape changes over time, so we rely on friends and siblings and therapists and other stories as we seek to identify with our own. Most of us get to do this in private. Baby Keem is doing it in public.
Keem put out his first album, The Melodic Blue, when he was just twenty years old. It was a commercial and critical success that brought everything that comes along with growing fame and Grammy awards. But it’s been five years since then, and the longer-than-expected gap between his debut and sophomore album, Ca$ino, left fans guessing as to what was going on and what might come of it.
Released earlier this year, Ca$ino was accompanied by a three-part documentary. More than promotional content, the home videos and interviews trace Keem’s childhood and tell the story behind the making of the album. The opening scene features Auntie Connie introducing herself, the filmmaker behind this visual diary, saying that she grew up in Long Beach, California. She quickly corrects herself, “Well, actually Gardena … well, hell I’m lying to y’all, I was born and raised in Chicago, and then the rest of my life I spend my days out here in California.” It’s as if she just has to tell us the whole truth, like she can’t let us have just a part of the story. No shortcuts or sugarcoating, we have to see the whole thing, how it really is.
This truth-telling tendency runs in the family. Ca$ino is just 37 minutes long, but it still manages to carry a lot of life, a lot of truth, as Keem tells his story. There is celebration here, genuine joy, bravado, some goofiness even, and a sense of real achievement. But there is heaviness, too. The album deals with childhood trauma, gambling addiction, substance abuse, and the experience of growing up without the care kids deserve. Weaving these plot points into one story, one album, requires the kind of vulnerability that true creativity demands.
Certain tracks highlight Keem’s playfulness and freedom. “Birds & the Bees” is catchy and humorous, and he seems to have a lot of fun with his cousin Kendrick Lamar on “Good Flirts.” Some reviewers worry that tracks like these are inconsistent with the project’s generally introspective tone. But I take the opposite view — it is precisely by including these upbeat, romantic, and celebratory moments that Ca$ino succeeds in narrating the darknesses of a troubled childhood. Keem had previously teased that he was going to release an album called Child with Wolves, which in his words would have been a sadder body of work. But what we get in Ca$ino is not a sad album. It is one that bears witness to the full range of human life. By giving it more time and allowing for this complexity, Keem creates a more spacious listening experience.
To forgive is to remember graciously. In choosing to narrate the story of his childhood the way he does, Keem doesn’t just teach us how to make good art, he also shows us a picture of the way of grace. The documentary and album together depict the difficulties of his upbringing in Long Beach and Las Vegas. Some tracks, such as “Highway 95 pt.2” offer especially vivid recollections:
Cried all night every time I took a beating
Runaway child, sleeping under highways
Growing up and going on a tiradeThirteen, I’m living in the ditches
I don’t recall my mother in the kitchenI sit outside with nothing, feeling lonely
No stamps at the end of the month so I’m hungryThese days, I just wish I could fly away
Mama at the door about three in the morning
I wake up as a burden, I’m the kid that no one wanted.
This song, along with others like “No Security” and “I am not a Lyricist,” reveals the thematic spine at the center of the album. It is a confessional project, a memoir of sorts. Keem is figuring out how to tell his story in public. He’s doing so in a way that unites the painful experiences of his childhood with the love that yet remains. Holding these extremes together produces an album that allows him to showcase his range as an artist as he explores what it means to be fully alive.
Perhaps it is also what allows him to forgive, to remember graciously. Keem does not settle for any reductive narrative here. It’s always more complicated than we hope. There’s always another side to the story. And so, along with his poignant honesty about the failures and abuses and wrongdoings he endured, the absolving refrain runs throughout Ca$ino’s final song: “I don’t blame you, mama. I don’t blame you, mama.”
