While the back half of The Kid That Did is characterized by midtempo rumination, the album kicks off with a suite of higher-energy rap tracks certain to satisfy fans of Babyface Ray bars. His elastic flows stretch and snap across “Rubberband Man,” stopping and starting like rush hour traffic. “I’m in H. Lorenzo / the shit I cop could’ve put down for a benzo / She keep fuckin’ lame n****s, put her in the friend zone.” The successes of “Shy Kid,” from overseas recognition to splurging out at Louis Vuitton, aren’t quite unblemished: “Mr. Thuggin’ Out The Corner Suite” still tallies up the smoking fees paid out, the overdoses in his neighborhood, the declining bars of 5G when your home is big enough to block cell service.
Unsurprisingly, Babyface Ray loosens up the most around his zaniest collaborators. Team Eastside mentor Peezy barrels through “Ghetto Boyz,” smirking “Boy, get off my dick ’cause you ain’t got no cheese / Made a half a mil’ at home, I ain’t have to leave,” as Ray adlibs; Bossman Dlow’s Tallahassee baritone is a booming counterpoint to Ray’s creeping verse, cannonballing through the James Bond theme on “Count Money.” Taken alongside the contractually refracted fragment of Britney Spears’s “Toxic” animating Veeze feature “Wavy Navy University” and the album’s #TBT promotional trailer, which sees a young Ray watching Jay-Z on TV in 2001 before becoming a televised star himself by 2024, The Kid That Did brings to mind an image of Babyface Ray slouched over a couch by Versace or Hermes, channel surfing from MTV to TNT while waiting for his burner phone to ring.