You may not have noticed it or thought about it much, but Lil Baby is on a very short list of rappers who doesn’t have any ink on his body. The ATL rapper recently opened up about his choice to stay tattoo-free in a new interview with New York Times, and it all has to do with stacking his paper. Baby said he never wanted to look like a “dope boy” and wanted to keep his appearance straight for future meetings with the white folks.
“I never saw me being a rapper,” he explained. “A big-dog dope boy, that’s it. Not even just a dope boy. That’s why I ain’t got no tattoos, because I always knew I was going to run my money up, and I was going to have to go sit in front of some people to do something with my money. And I didn’t want them to look at me like a dope boy.”
He added, “I had to keep my appearance straight. I literally said, ‘When I sit down in front of these white folks, I don’t want to have no tattoos.’ In a way, it’s still that today. Because when I’m sitting in these meetings, I don’t have tattoos on my face. I know they’d have to think something if I’ve got tattoos on my face.”
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Elsewhere in the interview, Lil Baby made it clear that rapping is nothing more than stepping stone for his future endeavors. He said he hopes to shift to a position of power as soon as he possibly can. “I don’t care about my own music,” he said. “I really want to own a label — like Def Jam, though. Like Roc Nation. I’d rather go that way, where I manage a Selena Gomez and get 10 percent off of it. Where I’m not even on the scene no more. That’s my mindset. Boy, if I can pop two artists right now, I’m down to slow up on what I got going on, straight up. Why wouldn’t I? I can make the same money and I don’t have to be catching all these planes.”
Read all that and more in the in-depth interview with New York Times right here and look for his new album, My Turn, to drop tomorrow, Friday (February 28).
