Baby Keem opened up about the difficult upbringing his Aunt Connie experienced during an emotional conversation with Nardwuar.
The Ca$ino rapper appeared on the Monday (May 18) episode of Nardwuar’s show, where the legendary interviewer surprised him with a 1993 photo of his aunts, Connie and Tracy. The picture originally ran in the July 27, 1993 edition of The Los Angeles Times — and Keem revealed he had never seen it before.
The image featured Connie (LaConnie Govan), Tracy (LaTracy Govan), and another young girl arriving in a limousine to spend a week at Camp Hollywoodland in Griffith Park. The children were reportedly selected as part of a school program aimed at preventing fights among students.
“I’ve never seen this before. I don’t even know about the story. I don’t even know if they know about this,” Keem said around the 10-minute mark of the interview before asking if he could keep the photo. “I’ve got to make a FaceTime call right after this. This is crazy.”
Connie, who helped raise Baby Keem, also serves as a co-director of the rapper’s three-part Ca$ino documentary Booman, which dropped in February.
The Grammy-winning artist later reflected on the harsh realities his aunts faced growing up in South Central Los Angeles during the 1990s, a time when gang violence heavily impacted their neighborhood.
“That’s most of the stories that I would get. How poor we were. Motel-to-motel living,” Keem shared. “There was a situation [when] my aunt was around 9 years old and she was actually caught in crossfire. So the fact that she’s even alive today, it just puts the whole picture on this and [she] was able to succeed in this way and still go to school and be blessed enough to have the the brains to raise somebody like me, this is a doctrine to those stories.”
Baby Keem also shared that he was “excited” to call his aunt after discovering the photo during the interview.
As shown in Booman, Keem was partly raised by his Aunt Connie in a small one-bedroom apartment in Long Beach before eventually moving to Las Vegas. The documentary features family home footage, conversations with relatives, and studio moments with his cousin and longtime collaborator Kendrick Lamar.
