LA rapper Baby Keem (who is Kendrick Lamar's cousin) has been on the rise lately. He's appeared on records by Kendrick, Beyonce, Jay Rock, Schoolboy Q, and others; he partnered with Kendrick's new pgLang company; he was named an XXL freshman; and he recently put out the promising two-song single "Hooligan" / "Sons & Critics Freestyle." Kendrick has now interviewed Keem for the 40th anniversary issue of i-D, and they talked about a handful of different topics, including how a DJ Dahi beat intended for Kendrick's DAMN. ended up on Keem's 2019 project Die for My Bitch:
Kendrick: That was my favourite beat, I just forgot about it because that was a beat that I was supposed to put on Damn, but I never got to it. It was in my top five DJ Dahi beats. But the fact that you grabbed that beat, and did something that I wouldn’t ever have done on it, you made it a better song than what I would have done. And that’s why I was like okay, this nigga hard.
Keem: When I stole that beat, I think I had “finished” Die for My Bitch. So I was working on the next project that’s about to come out now. I stole a beat that was too ahead of its time for me and it opened up a whole new world. After that I started working on Die for My Bitch again. When I did the song, I thought, yeah this shit’s hard. I remember niggas started hitting me, and they were saying that ‘this might be your best song ever’. So to hear that was tight. That song propelled me to do experimental shit with Die for My Bitch.