Artist Profile: Baby K
If you can imagine Iggy Azalea as an Italian rapper, then you’ve got something approaching the career of Claudia Judith Nahum, better known as Baby K. It’s not a perfect comparison, but there are some similarities early in their careers to highlight. They both spent their formative years outside of the country where they reached their greatest heights, and they both had to fight against naysayers who thought that they weren’t really hip hop or that they were getting by on their looks instead of their talent as an artist. Finally, they both broke through with mega hits featuring catchy hooks sung by a featured artist. The comparisons stop there, however.
Baby K was born in Singapore to Italian parents who then moved to Jakarta and finally to London when she was a child. While in the British capital, she honed her talent at the Harrow School of Young Musicians. At the age of seventeen she moved to Rome and joined the Italian hip hop scene, deciding to write and rap in Italian rather than English. After a decade of hosting radio shows and featuring on underground records, she started to gain traction with the release of her first two E.P.’s, S.O.S., and 2011’s Femmina Alfa. The latter’s title track was Baby K’s first commercially successful solo single. Embedded below, you can hear the harder sound that was much closer to conventional rap than what we’re used to from her nowadays, but the fast tempo and flow, staples of Baby K’s career, are already visible.
The success of her second LP led to opportunities to take the next step in her career. Her third E.P. featured collaborations with Ntò and Gemitaiz. She opened for well-established Italian rappers like Gué Pequeno and Marracash, as well as worldwide stars like Nicki Minaj and Azaelia Banks on their dates in Italy. In 2013 she was signed by Sony and released her first commercially successful album, Una Seria, featuring the singles “Sparami“, “Killer“, and “Non cambierò mai” with Marracash. Although Killer was the bigger hit featuring singer and producer Tiziano Ferro, the fourth and final single from the album, “Sei Sola” stands out for me because of its 90s R&B vibe.
It was her second Sony album, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, that launched Baby K to heights never before reached by an Italian artist. The hands of producers Takagi & Ketra are all over the disc, with forays into electropop (“Anna Wintour“, “Chiudo gli occhi e salto“) and straightforward pop music (“Venerdì“) completely dropping the pretense of hip hop. The standout song from the album was “Roma – Bangkok”, featuring Italian X-Factor alum Giusy Ferreri belting out the unforegettable hook. Although the lyrics were written by Federica Abbate (with a possible assist from Rocco Hunt), they are personal to Baby K, as they reference several of the places she lived (Southeast Asia, London, Rome) while growing up. There is but a faint echo of the swagger that Baby K brought to her earlier bars, but the softer sound was a smashing success. No Italian song sold more copies in the past decade, being certified nine times platinum. The video, reminiscent of Thelma and Louise, was the first Italian music video to ever reach 100 million views, and at 260 million as of July 2020, it is still the most viewed of all time.
Rather than resting on her laurels, Baby K reinvented herself again with a change in hair color coinciding with her biggest style shift yet. On Icona, the journey away from her hip hop roots accelerated. “Aspettavo solo te” and “Come no” are relatively straightforward pop songs with some internatonal touches, but two other tracks represented new directions for Baby K. The first single from her Icona album was the delightful Latin Pop summer hit “Voglio Ballare Con Te“, with Spanish singer Andres Dvicio. The foray into the world of hispanic music is also apparent on the album’s biggest track, “Da zero a cento”, which was influential in establishing Reggaeton as the dominant sound in Italian pop music (especially during the summer) over the last few years. Despite the catchiness and much copied dance move, I can’t help but lament the fact that this song’s success paved the way for an avalanche of derivative and uninspired reggaeton that has flooded the airwaves in Italy.
Speaking of derivative and uninspired, Baby K spent 2019 churning out songs such as “Playa” and “Buenos Aires“, in addition to featuring on Fred De Palma‘s “Dio benedica la reggaeton“, which appropriately translates as God bless Reggaeton. Its frustrating, because she has always had far more musical chops than her critics have given her credit for, and until now she hadn’t been afraid to reinvent herself by embracing different musical styles. Even when she crossed over to making pop music towards the middle of the decade, there was still something fresh to enjoy, both musically and lyrically. Since the success of Icona, however, she seems stuck in a musical rut. There’s no new ground being being broken, and the artist that had to struggle for credibility has now become the generic autotuned popstar that her detractors caricatured her as years ago. Her latest single, “Non mi basta più” featuring musically challenged influencer Chiara Ferragni is emblematic of this trend. The focus is more on exploiting the synergy between the queen of lifestyle blogs and the queen of Italian pop in order to sell Pantene products than it is on making the kind of satisfying music that Baby K worked so hard to create for the first decade of her career.
