Sada Baby isn’t in the mood. Nobody is. Just a few hours before we meet on a frigid day in the middle of February, news broke that the emerging Brooklyn rap star Pop Smoke had been shot and killed. The tragic story has Sada Baby buried in his phone, blowing smoke out the window of a Yukon XL parked in the middle of Manhattan. “I didn’t know bro personally, but it’s an unspoken brotherhood,” the Detroit rapper stammers, as Pop Smoke’s voice booms from the SUV’s speakers. Sada then begins to have a heated discussion with his management team about the day’s schedule. “We need to get our shit together,” he screams at the three men who are supposed to make his life easier. “Especially on a day like this!”
Following the outburst and some vague finger-pointing, the car is dead silent. Seconds begin to feel like minutes. Eventually, a member of Sada’s team lightens the mood with talk of Michigan college basketball. Soon enough, the moment of grief and anger dissipates, as the car fills with laughter, Pop Smoke music, and the fog of a freshly lit blunt.
Spending time with Sada Baby, 27, is a lot like immersing yourself in his music, which is unpredictable and prone to mood swings. Take his January mixtape, Brolik—part of a deluge of songs he’s released across the last six months—where he cooly delivers devilish one-liners on the intro only to scream ad-libs with the intensity of the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket later on. The mixtape’s centerpiece, “WWF,” exists on both sides of the spectrum, as Sada gradually builds from chill to complete chaos while dropping references to video games, NBA stars, X-Men, and Dragon Ball Z: “Modern Warfare a nigga in real life, got that kilo with me/I might shoot this shit through Indiana, Oladipo with it/Regenerate my health like Wolverine so I don’t need no nigga/Percocets treat me like Senzu beans, you know I keep them bitches,” he howls. It’s a punchline marathon that invokes the spirit of Lil Wayne’s superhuman mixtape run in the 2000s.
As we make our way through the city, there’s no way to get a specific read on Sada—his actions and words depend on his mood, which changes by the minute. Several times, he gets up and walks away from everyone mid-conversation, without warning. He disappears while strolling through Midtown only to be found in a home goods store in search of a Dickie’s sweatsuit. He’s already dressed like a Nike-sponsored basketball player who just left practice, in a snow white hoodie, blue high top sneakers, and blue sweatpants with a red bandana tied around his right knee. At one point, he shows up to streetwear mogul Jeff Staples’ showroom and half-heartedly selects even more sweatsuits to add to his collection.
He’s annoyed by a lot of things: the Detroit Pistons dancer who told him she wants to be a stripper (he rolls his eyes at the memory), a pair of basketball shoes purchased for him sitting in the back of the SUV (he smacks them away), his recent single “Slide” (“It’s cool, I guess”). He can afford to shrug off his new song because he’s constantly dipping into a seemingly endless well of tracks. Since last fall, Sada has uploaded a music video exclusively to YouTube nearly every week, with each one collecting around 5 million views. It’s a streak that’s currently taking his sound beyond the Midwest. “That’s been my regimen since the early days,” says Sada, in a vacant conference room, leaning back far enough in a swivel chair that his thick and faintly red dreads are nearly touching the ground. “I don’t like being slowed down. I like dropping whatever I feel like at my pace.”
Of Sada Baby’s output in the last several months, “SkubaRu” might be the best track. On it, he shrieks, “His daddy was a jive turkey, so we had to ham him” with the passion of Triple H the week before Wrestlemania. Typically his verses are delivered over traditional Detroit instrumentals, complete with horror movie-ready pianos, funky basslines, pounding drums, and pop samples. But it’s his music videos, usually uploaded to hometown YouTube channels like Jerry Production and The Hip Hop Lab, that really bring everything to life. No matter if he’s reflecting on pain or laughing at the misfortune of others, the video will feature Sada Baby on a street corner, near a convenience store, or in front of an ambulance, dancing like he’s on an episode of Soul Train. “I can’t help it, even if I’m talking about drugs or making basketball analogies I’m gon’ dance,” he says. “I’m a memeable motherfucker.”
Now, Sada Baby is adjusting to life as one of hip-hop’s premier personalities. “I’m cool with 80 percent of the memes and Twitter videos I see myself in,” he says. As he’s talking, he decides to FaceTime Lil Yachty, who is clearly not expecting the call. When the Atlanta rapper answers, he happens to be holding a baby doll that looks just like him. Yachty proceeds to put the phone down for a second and returns with another baby doll that looks like 21 Savage. Sada nearly slides out of his chair from laughter. (The origin of the dolls is unclear.) After the short call, Sada’s demeanor quickly changes again. He makes rare direct eye contact so he can end his unfinished thought, “Listen, if people want to mimic my dances or make jokes, it’s cool, just don’t disrespect me.” Just like everything he says—in his raps or sitting in a New York office—Sada Baby means it.
Born Casada Sorrell, Sada Baby was raised on Detroit’s east side. He grew up listening to rappers like Soulja Boy, Ying Yang Twins, and the YoungBloodz as well as local staples like the Eastside Chedda Boyz and Street Lord’z, but he didn’t start to seriously rap himself until his 20s. “For a while I was just living couch to couch, staying at my grandma house, working at restaurants,” Sada says of his early days as a rapper. In 2016, after years of little progress in the hip-hop world, he was on the brink of enrolling in culinary school. But then he won a local rap competition and reshifted his focus back to music.
He began to release music on YouTube at an accelerated rate, culminating with Skuba Sada, his breakout 2017 mixtape. Meanwhile, Detroit was in the early days of a rap renaissance, which began with the release of Tee Grizzley’s “First Day Out.” The song was a landmark moment for the city, proof that its sound didn’t need to change in order to go countrywide. Sada Baby wound up signing to Tee Grizzley’s imprint, Grizzley Gang, a deal that would ultimately expose him to the crushing realities of the music industry.
In 2018, Sada Baby released the video for “Bloxk Party,” featuring fellow Detroit rapper Drego, which has since amassed nearly 60 million views on the WorldStarHipHop YouTube channel. Produced by Detroit’s Jose the Plug, the song introduced many outside of the Midwest to Sada Baby’s larger-than-life personality. In the DIY house-party visual, Sada rattles off threats while shimmying shirtless and executing a perfect robot.
But he didn’t get a chance to enjoy his moment. “I had the biggest song in Detroit, No. 2 song on urban radio, I was doing streams, but I didn’t get to see any of that money,” he says while taking a seat at the head of the table in the conference room. Revisiting that experience still stings, and it’s hard for him to even get the words out. “The whole time I was thinking, This is what it’s supposed to be like signed to a label. The money comes later. Only for me to find out that I had the biggest song of my career and I didn’t get to see what it would do for my life.”
Following “Bloxk Party,” Sada Baby’s pace slowed down, and he wasn’t being allowed to release music at the speed he had become accustomed to. In 2019, he got a lawyer and bought himself out of the contract with Tee Grizzley. “I wish no harm on him, but I don’t fuck with him,” Sada tells me, looking down at his phone. “What they did to me I wouldn’t have done to nobody.”
Now under a reshaped deal with Warner Bros. subsidiary Asylum Records and free from the clamps of Grizzley Gang, Sada Baby’s last several months have been more productive. On any given week, the only thing in hip-hop that seems guaranteed is that a new Sada Baby music video will surface. His new mixtape Skuba Sada 2, out this week, is a compilation of all the YouTube hits that have yet to hit streaming, with an official debut album due later this year. But he still enjoys the spontaneous excitement of YouTube compared to more official outlets. “If you put shit on streaming you gotta wait for it to clear, and the labels want to put it on a playlist,” he says. “But I’m just happy as long as I can drop. That’s what you rap for.”
