Lil Baby Addresses Talk He Fell Off in HOT 97 Interview

By Miles Carter, November 10, 2026

An official HOT 97 YouTube interview, titled "Lil Baby Explains Fresh, Pharrell Reference Tracks, Young Thug Advice & Not Falling Off," was published Nov 9, 2026, at 8:30 PM ET on the station's verified channel. The upload runs 42 minutes 13 seconds. The official description says Lil Baby sat down with Nessa, for the first time in eight years, to talk about his new album Fresh, and that he also addressed people saying he has fallen off and how social media has changed the music industry. Fresh is out now. KAZI previously covered the FRESH album-day release.

Lil Baby Explains Fresh, Pharrell Reference Tracks, Young Thug Advice & Not Falling Off

The clip has no official transcript or human-made captions. Auto-generated captions from the official upload were reviewed only as speech-recognition text, which is not quote-safe. The summary below is a broad paraphrase of those captions from the portion of the conversation about the "fell off" talk. Unclear or disputed wording is omitted, and no quotations from the interview are used.

Lil Baby addresses the criticism

In that stretch of the interview, Nessa asks how Lil Baby takes people saying he is falling off. He treats that talk as less important than a broader point he makes about hip-hop, and he describes the internet as having changed completely since he came into the game. He talks about engagement-driven commentary, including reviews from people who can upload anything, becoming more common than listening to an album.

He says calling a Lil Baby album bad, or saying he fell off, is now a way to get strong engagement, and that content makers who have not heard his songs follow whatever that content is. He says he sees that pattern and finds it hard to buy into it. When Nessa notes that he does not seem fazed, he says that even if it were completely true that he had completely fallen off, he still would not be mad.