Whose Song Is Quavo's 'Baby Breath'? The Comments Say Tyler, The Creator's

“Baby Breath” is the fifth track on QRÖMELIFE, Quavo's third solo album, released on 2 October through Quality Control. Pharrell Williams executive-produced the album and produced it, and this is its most crowded song: Pharrell, Tyler, The Creator and A$AP Rocky all appear on it. The official audio went up on Quavo's YouTube channel at 04:00 UTC that day. Nineteen hours later it had 99,366 views, 4,413 likes and 430 comments.

Before release, Tyler wrote that his verse here was the best of his career and perhaps one of the top 25 in rap history. We tried to time it and could not: our speech model cannot reliably tell four rappers apart, and on two runs it gave two different answers for the same passage. So we counted the reaction instead. Of the 40 comments YouTube ranks highest, fifteen are about Tyler, with 2,378 likes between them. Six are about Rocky, four about Quavo, with 115 likes, and two about Pharrell. Most of Tyler's fifteen tease the verse rather than rank it; the three that take up the top-25 claim all laugh at it.

How it sounds

There is no intro. The rapping starts in the first second and the level hardly moves for three and a half minutes. It is the loudest master of the new songs we have measured this week, and the one with the smallest gap between its loud and quiet passages. The hook that opens the song comes back at 1:39, where the words thin out for half a minute; around it the passages are dense, the kind of three-to-five-words-a-second rapping our sound classifier tags as rap all the way through. The last twenty seconds switch to something else entirely: brass and orchestral sounds, which the classifier files under soundtrack and theme music, an outro that sounds like the producer signing his name.

Why it may not travel

On 3 October Quavo had no song in Spotify's daily top 200 in the United States, in Canada or worldwide. That includes “Backwards” with T.I., the album's single with a video, which has 1.86 million YouTube views in three weeks, and “Trance (Walk It Down)”, at 920,000 since August. A song stacked with guests usually rides on its host's momentum. Here the host has none on the streaming charts, and the conversation it has started is about one of the guests.

Our call

A moment for Tyler, not yet a hit for Quavo. Our bet: by 9 October “Baby Breath” is not in Spotify's daily top 200 in the United States.