How did Lil Baby get his name?
Lil Baby is one of the biggest rappers making music today. With four solo albums and multiple hit singles under his belt, he’s one of the faces of Atlanta and one of the best-selling hip-hop artists to consistently release music since the late 2020s.
Born on December 3rd, 1994, as Dominique Armani Jones, Baby grew up in the Oakland City area of Atlanta, Georgia, and was raised by his mother and two sisters after his father left when he was just two years old.
“He was the only boy, and I had two girls,” his mother told Rolling Stone during an interview. “I spent a lot of time with him. He didn’t really have anybody. I guess you can’t miss what you never had. It wasn’t like his father was in the picture and then took off.”
In Year 9, he dropped out of Booker T. Washington High School in order to prioritise drug dealing. “Needed the money, more than anything,” he said. “I knew all the drug dealers around my neighbourhood. When I was like ten, 11, I was hanging out with a dude who was like 17. He was getting money to buy a car, having his own little spot. So he was a lot of my motivation, too.”
Quality Control Music co-founder Kevin ‘Coach K’ Lee eventually persuaded Baby to rap and got him to sign to his label. “I remember one day, we was standing outside the studio,” he said. “I’ll never forget this. He had on all white, and I was just like, ‘Baby, man, why don’t you rap?’
“‘Like, you got the swag, you got the lingo, you get respect around the city from the east side to the west side to the south side. Why don’t you rap?’ He used to be like, ‘Coach, I’m a street n*gga.’ He used to laugh at me.”
Baby released his debut album, Harder Than Ever, in 2018. Since then, every project has reached number one on the Bilboard 200, with My Turn, It’s Only Me, and WHAM all topping the chart, as well as his Lil Durk collaborative album The Voice of the Heroes. He’s also had a number of top ten singles, including ‘Yes Indeed’, ‘Drip Too Hard’, ‘The Bigger Picture’ and ‘Do We Have a Problem?’
So, how did Lil Baby get his name?
Lil Baby acquired his name when he was a kid as a result of hanging around a lot of older people, and was specifically given the name by a man named Wicced. “I used to be going to sleep wherever, I used to leave my trash everywhere,” he said. “Typical little baby shit. They start calling me Lil Baby.”
When he started rapping, Baby used his nickname as his stage name for ease. “I ain’t need my name, a nickname and a rap name, so my nickname, I just went with my rap name,” he told Complex. “It ain’t make no sense to me to come up with a whole new rap name.”
He added, “Everybody who I know, their name is their rap name. I don’t really know nobody who came out with a new rap name, ’cause you already want people to know who you are.”