4oe Baby - Slide Down

4oe Baby. Photo by Corteece.

4oe Baby has spent the past year becoming Kansas City's foremost underage emcee, but he respectfully asks that you refrain from focusing on the underage part. "Stop asking my age, bitch I'm this many," he slyly raps on "Slide Down," the title track to his makeshift debut EP (a recent single with three additional songs tacked on front after the fact). And that's not the only one-liner on the song that should bring a mischievous smile to your face; later on, "Yeah, your pussy good, but I'll never put my lips on it."

 

Opening track "4oe3zy" features Baby's most aggressive and percussive verse yet, but ceding the opening lines to Ohio rapper and Rich The Factor collaborator P3 on an already short song may not have been the ideal way to start the EP, potentially confusing new listeners.

 

Like the title track, "Amos" also features a couple laughs ("Quarantine, jacking off to this Spanish bitch / Talked the whole time and I couldn't even understand the bitch"), but it may be Baby's most quietly grim offering yet, exposing realities of his lifestyle beyond the gleeful gun toting featured in the "Puppets" music video --"'member we was broke, tryna eat / Selling tar, not weed." "Brothers," a quick-moving, souped-up oldies flip, features 4oe Baby rapping with a vitality not unlike that of red-hot Detroit star Sada Baby.

While "Slide Down" is the only song of the four that thoroughly stands up to previous singles "Puppets" and "That One Song" (future Kansas City classics, in my humble opinion), the release remains a fun and seamless listen. 4oe Baby gives fans loyal to the tougher side of Kansas City hip-hop reason to be optimistic for its future.

Stream the full EP here.