Lil Baby releases 'The Bigger Picture'

Why it matters

"The Bigger Picture" came out June 12, 2020, on Quality Control/Motown/Capitol. Lil Baby (Dominique Jones) was the most-streamed rapper in the country at the time. The song was a direct response to the May 25, 2020, killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the subsequent national Black Lives Matter uprisings. The song debuted at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and Lil Baby donated all of its proceeds to civil-rights organizations including the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, and the Bail Project. The release is one of the few major direct-response political singles by a streaming-era trap rapper. The lyric is specific (Lil Baby names George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery), the production is the conventional Atlanta-trap aesthetic of his catalog, and the conceit holds: a rapper at his commercial peak deliberately deploying his platform for direct political response. The Lil Baby of the mid-2020s would later become more publicly conservative and would distance himself from elements of the 2020 BLM moment. The 2020 song stands on its own. You can hear it now and it still does the work.