In Baby, he saw someone with the voice, style, and respect required for success in Atlanta rap’s ecosystem. With a salt-and-pepper beard and slow gait, he’s the calm at the center of Quality Control’s constant hurricane.
K is the power broker behind the millennium’s first cadre of Atlanta legends (Young Jeezy, Gucci Mane) and those shaping the city’s future (Migos, Lil Yachty). It was Coach K who noticed something in a 17-year-old Baby the young dealer had yet to see in himself. “They probably get like 30 grand a show, but they’re doing three, four shows, so they come back with 50, 60, and I might win the whole 50.”
“They was getting money, but goddamn,” Baby says, still incredulous. It’s not because he doesn’t have the funds to give, he assures the room. To this day, he says, he still hasn’t paid certain parties back from the nights when his hot hand went cold. Baby is detailing a night when acquaintances chipped in money in hopes of seeing one of his winning streaks up close, the type that would leave everyone chasing him across the city to win their cash back. As ashes hit the floor, Kevin “Coach K” Lee, the founder and COO of Quality Control, appears, as if endowed with a sixth sense for moments when Baby might say something that will land him in trouble. Satisfied, he packs the dice up while finishing a blunt the size of Kawhi Leonard’s middle finger. Within a couple of seconds, all of the money returns to Baby’s hands. “You got to just keep shooting,” he says. I maintain that he never told me, and look to his crew for support that never comes. It’s complicated, but under Baby’s tutelage I - eventually - win $200, and reach for the pair of hundreds on the floor. There are additional rules: 4-5-6 is an automatic win, so is rolling two matching numbers and one 6 1-2-3 is an automatic loss. For example, the young rapper rolls a 4-4-2 and explains that his score would be two. “The object of the game is to get two of these the same,” Baby says. Every time he throws the dice he snaps his fingers, trying to will the numbers to his cause. Baby, born Dominique Jones, is a patient and methodical teacher, calmly answering my inane questions about throwing technique. Inside the headquarters of Quality Control, the most successful hip-hop label currently operating in Atlanta and home to Migos, City Girls, and Lil Yachty, three green dice bounce against the wooden floor. Outside, torrential rain falls on a collection of cars worth many, many mortgages. The 25-year-old rapper has spent the past 15 minutes teaching me to play cee-lo, a dice game that helped make him famous in certain Atlanta circles long before he reached legal drinking age. She reminds us that while we may all be in the same storm, we are not all in the same boat.Lil Baby has four pockets stuffed with cash, and he’d like to keep it that way. 'Vanessa Nakate continues to teach a most critical lesson.
#The bigger picture skin
In telling the inspiring personal story of how she found her voice, Vanessa shows readers that no matter your age, location or skin colour, you can be an effective activist. In this exceptional book, she traces the links between the climate crisis and anti-racism, feminism, economics and even extremist radicalization, revealing how our best hope of saving our planet is to work together across continents. As she explains, 'we are on the front line, but we are not on the front page.'Witnessing the destructive effects of global warming in her own community propelled Vanessa to become the first climate striker in Uganda at just twenty-one years old, despite risks to her personal safety. Despite this, people from the Global South - and people of colour from across the world - are often expunged from the picture of climate activism, as typified by Vanessa's own erasure from a press photograph at Davos in 2020. This is one of the great injustices of the climate crisis: those who have contributed the least to its creation are now suffering its consequences most severely. Such an image is only possible through the erasure of the voices of people living in the Global South, where environmental disasters are already having a devastating impact on communities, and especially on women. In A Bigger Picture, Vanessa Nakate exposes the shortcomings of our global discussions around climate change, which consistently envisage the environmental crisis as a problem for future generations.
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