One day, not long ago, in a suburb of Atlanta, SahBabii brought his elementary-school-aged son to a stage play of The Three Little Pigs. There, the quiet and reclusive SahBabii, blown away by the elaborate set design, swiftness of the costume changes, and expressive acting, began to imagine how theater could work in his own shows. When he brought his Resurrection Tour to New York’s Webster Hall, the inspiration was obvious. The show was a family affair with spoken-word interludes, crafty sets, and lean but effective storytelling. I turned to my friend and called it “SahBabii: The Musical.”
Throughout the night, joined by his brothers, T3 and Wikii, and childhood buddy Don Quan, SahBabii loosely told the story of his rise. The story starts with SahBabii as one of many teenagers who wanted to be and sound like Young Thug. He then stumbled his way out of the Atlanta mixtape circuit and into niche internet fame thanks to 2016’s S.A.N.D.A.S., a mixtape full of fantastical wildlife imagery and pornographic lust. Things got bigger last year after he dropped the weathered yet optimistic Saaheem, which threads together the flowery, goofball language of his earlier mixtapes with heartfelt and grounded storytelling, a style he developed with 2021’s grief-stricken Do It for Demon. In a way, Saaheem is the culmination of all the music he’s been putting out since even before S.A.N.D.A.S., back when his melodies pulled from swag-rap pioneer Skooly, not Thug. Now, at 28, and with a certified hit in the Saaheem anthem “Viking,” SahBabii is experiencing the kind of viral moment that’s surprising for a rapper who has been unflinchingly on his own wavelength for almost a decade.
SahBabii’s stage show is as sincere and offbeat as his music. Sure, Sah is known for regularly pumping out Hall of Fame–worthy raunch, like “I wanna eat her Garfield and rub up on her feet” (“Boyfriend”) and “She got on her knees and sucked the dick up like some crab meat” (“Giraffes & Elephants”), but the pure vulgarity wouldn’t work if you couldn’t also feel the way that he’s stitching together an intimate glimpse of his Atlanta, the city where he’s lived since moving from Chicago at age 13. One where the memories are as much of romance as violence, as based around out-of-pocket jokes as tears. Where his ear for gentle piano beats and dreamy Auto-Tune vocals express wistfulness for the days on his block when not much mattered other than getting some play or a bowl of his auntie’s mac and cheese.
Don Quan, who monologues on all the best SahBabii projects, opened the night with one of his signature soliloquies, set at a reproduction of the street corner where Sah came of age in Atlanta. After a minute or so, the spotlight shifted across the stage, where SahBabii, in a black suit with a red tie, rapped “Don Quan Intro” at the sort of white-cloth dinner table you find at old-school red-sauce joints. It felt like being dropped into the “How did I get here?” narration at the start of A Bronx Tale.
After an outfit change, the stage curtains unspooled to reveal a nearly life-sized replica of SahBabii’s teenage home—you can see the same house in his archived video for “Rodeo,” where Sah and his friends hang out at the crib and go to the strip club—with massive pink squid tentacles wrapped around the walls and through the windows. He stood on top of the house in a casual outfit, ripping through a mix of old mixtape deep cuts and Saaheem standouts with only a faint backing track for assistance. He hit the high notes of old favorite “Marsupial Superstar.” He smiled as he snapped prop belts during “Belt Boyz.” A man in the upper balcony joined in on the imaginary spanking when he took off his own belt and whipped it against the wall repeatedly. The crowd, which seemed to range from teens to thirtysomethings, knew the words to most stuff, but really went above and beyond for the line on “Roll With Me” where he goes, “The opps went carnivore, them niggas on straight meat.”
While that was going on, the front door of the model home was used by his brothers and Don Quan to walk in and out at their will like Urkel on Family Matters. T3, who sings like he’s straight out of a turn-of-the-century R&B boy band, pulled up to do “Boyfriend.” When he hit a falsetto, a girl standing behind me acted like we were at the Scream Tour. Sah’s other brother, Wikii, showed up, too, as his hype man. Wikii was dressed in a leather get up fit for a Magic Mike dancer; I’m not entirely sure why, but the inexplicable and strange are key to the SahBabii experience.
The highlight of the night was when the lights went dim and SahBabii sat on a stool and shared a memory about the days when he used to hang out and watch TV with his cousins. That was his entry into “Anime World.” At that second, a song about anime boobs had never sounded sweeter and more poignant. The duality of comic and serious captured SahBabii perfectly.
The next afternoon, I linked up with SahBabii in the lobby of his hotel in Brooklyn Heights. He rocked a plum satin shirt and scarf combo, unbuttoned to show the multiple diamond-encrusted St. Peter’s Crosses around his neck, to match the one inked on his forehead. His locs were freshly done before his show the previous night. He spoke in a near whisper and was really observant. He was lanky enough, too, to have been the head of a Jim Boeheim zone defense. We rode over to a photo shoot in Lower Manhattan, where his brother T3 eyed Sah’s poses with the intensity of a dance mom assessing her kid’s choreography. There, we chopped it up about his live show, Atlanta hip-hop, and his Saaheem moment.
SahBabii: I can’t remember the names of anything, but when I was a kid in school I used to like watchin’ the plays. When I saw Three Little Pigs with my son it made me remember that.
I’d want it to be bigger, more actors on stage. What I really wanted to happen was to have a lot of people out there to act like they were standing on the block, servin’ and shit.
My manager had a lot of ideas. I knew I wanted to have the house, to be able to bring my world to other cities. But he came up with the idea to have the squid popping out. I feel like that really set the shit off.
That’s the area I grew up in, where I made my first song, where I met most of my friends. Don Quan, I met on Sylvan. My cousin who run the merch stand, I first met him on Sylvan. And, in that house, there was, like, 10 of us that stayed there. I used to wake up to the sound of tattoo needle guns, because that’s what my uncle did. I was 13 years old just seeing butt naked women up in there getting tattoos. I used to clean his tattoo gun tips for $5, then take that money right to the candy store.
Hell yeah. I eventually got a tattoo from him. He did most of my mine.
Yeah, this Pisces shit right here on my arm.
It was just them good ol’ days. I got so many cousins. We’d be eating cereal in the morning, watching Samurai Jack, Naruto, Dragon Ball, anything on Cartoon Network.
Yeah, on a bigger scale, I’d be thinking about how all I wanted was a big-ass mansion for me and all my cousins to live in. You ever see the RDCWorld house? Something like that. Somewhere for us to just live and play games all day.
I know yellow remind me of the sun. But I used to watch Power Rangers a lot as a kid, so I was always into colors. I used to draw a lot, too. I wasn’t good, but I’d be drawing all the WWE wrestlers: Triple H, John Cena, Jeff Hardy. Whenever I get a notebook or some paper, I’ll still doodle.
[Laughs] I don’t know. I be tellin’ that nigga to drop. I feel like sometimes he’s too caught up and focused on my shit.
Big, because he been singin’ for as long as I can remember. He’d be in the house singin’ Mario’s “Braid My Hair,” Omarion, R. Kelly, all that. Music wasn’t even my dream; it was his. He even had a group called 1095. It was T3 and these other guys, Snoopy, Keon, and Buster. This was during, like, the Rich Kidz era and they were always trying to get me on the mic.
Hell yeah. I was really in it. If you were there, you could just feel it. I was at Metro Skates. I was on Cleveland Ave. I went to Sylvan Hills Middle School and Booker T. Washington High School. I miss those times. It was free. Nobody anywhere else was doing it like that. In Atlanta, all the kids were making music together.
Rich Kidz, Everybody Eat Bread. I like that Bandit Gang Marco “Arrogant.” Tray G, “Da Way You Move.” It’s too many cuts.
Maybe early on, but when I got to S.A.N.D.A.S. it was more like just being outside in the summer, my imagination, being in the streets. I was listening to a lot of Young Thug, Future, and 21 [Savage]. But really when I seen 21 that influenced me a lot. I was like, “Damn, that nigga got a tattoo on his face and he made it?” He was all I used to listen to. Man, that Slaughter King tape, that “Mind Yo Business.” It was so raw, so odd.
L.A. was lit. Toronto was lit. Chicago, too, because I got a lot of family still there. My grandmother came out to see that show.
Being from Chicago, you just got a certain mindset of how to move in the streets; that’s with you forever. But it’s even in my music; like, the end of my song “Boyfriend,” with T3, was influenced by Chicago juke music and house music.
Hell yeah. We used to throw parties at my grandma’s house. It’d be a big party in the projects. There’d be juke music playing, the “Cha Cha Slide,” or whatever. We’d have the girls dancin’ on the boys and my grandma wasn’t even trippin’; it was crazy. I used to like this one juke song a lot that had a Lion King sample.
I don’t know. You probably subconsciously influenced by things without realizing it. Just like how they say, “Oh, you do this just like your Dad, or you just like your mama,” but you ain’t doing none of that on purpose.
Hell nah. My mama got a letter in the mail that said the odds were at least one or two of us were gonna get killed by gun violence one day. I didn’t want no more shootings, no more guns getting pulled out on you; I wanted to do some kid stuff. And when we moved to Atlanta we was instantly submerged in the culture, because we moved right to the middle of the hood.
When I made Do It for Demon I had just lost my cousin so I was thinking about a lot of negative stuff. After a couple of months, I was like, “Maybe, it’s weird to drop a whole project dedicated to a person none of my fans know?” But I still appreciate it, because it showed people another side of me, that I got real stuff going on in my life. Like a month before my cousin died, he told me he wanted to rap more about what I been through, and that message is really how that album and Saaheem came about.
I wanted to make my music more realistic. I still have the animal elements, but I wanted more of a balance. Like, on “Anaconda Livin,” it’s about how you gotta get your snake up. I been backstabbed a lot, so, shit, you gotta turn your snake up, too. The first thing I had on Saaheem was “Sylvan Rd Ridin Down Dill,” and I knew if the songs didn’t fit with that, I wasn’t puttin’ it on the project. What I remember from my English teacher was to get a plot and a location and build the story around that.
I had straight A’s. I liked Ms. Hill; she was like an art teacher. I did storytelling. I wrote a whole book in class based on The Boondocks when we had to write our own story.
I was quite surprised, because I got songs on the album for the females, but, for some reason, they took a likin’ to “Viking.”
I guess it’s the affirmations: “I give a fuck who like me,” “Go walk it off, my nigga, go hiking.” But a lot of people around me been tellin’ me to pop my shit. I never been a big bragger, but, on there, I popped my shit.
At first I was like, “Man, what they doing? This ain’t got shit to do with me!” But, you know what, do what y’all wanna do with music. Scream that shit. Real talk. That’s what I do with music, too. Consume it however you want to.
I played with it. [Laughs] I played around with it one time.
It’s a lot of “Hey, bro, fuck all the being comfortable in your bedroom; get your ass in the studio and really try something.” Saaheem the first time I got in a real studio. I used to sit in there for hours, do nothing, and just leave. But I had to get myself to keep going for months, to really start paying attention to details I never did before. I got people depending on me. I had to look at my mistakes and get influenced by that. You gotta live life to be influenced. If you stay in a black box all day with the lights off, you ain’t gonna learn nothing.
Yeah, it’s definitely good, but I gotta keep elevating. Really, I’m still on some small time shit, I’m not a big enough artist to be showing up to interviews late or anything. I don’t act like my shit don’t stink. But this all opening up something bigger.
[Laughs] That’s just Atlanta. That’s what we do.
