These days, Keem is always moving. His tour brings him to a new state almost every day. Peppered between shows he has promotional requirements, meet-and-greets, and the ever-present lure of artistic creation dividing his time. But each night, he gets up on stage, virtually alone for most of the show, and re-lives some of the hardest moments of his young life on perpetual loop.

When he was little, Keem and his mom moved from Long Beach to Las Vegas to be closer to family. Keem’s grandma and his aunt Connie and uncle Gerrell were out there. There was music and laughter, but there was addiction and chaos and the attendant lure of gambling to contend with, too. 

Keem’s mom was frequently absent; his aunt and his grandmother took on the caretaking duties. When Keem was six, he was briefly placed in a group home. “I walked in…there were these bunk beds. It was dark. All the kids are whispering like, ‘New kid. New kid. New kid.’ I go to sleep. I wake up, and kids are going to school from here. I’m like, where is my grandma? People are living here. What’s happening?” Keem recalls. “I remember crying that whole day.” 

He relays this part of the story in…not a lighthearted manner exactly, but when you’ve been through tragedy there’s a certain tenor dark stories can take — a can you believe how insane this is? tone that acts as a shield from embarrassing displays of pity, or a code for those who’ve experienced similar trauma. Then, harsh reality seeps back in: “This kid tried to comfort me. He was eight or nine. He was rubbing my back. We were playing Jenga. He was like, ‘Look, at least you have a home to go to. Some of us never get to go home.’ That always stuck with me. I did go home. Connie came and got me.”

Keem sought normalcy with his aunt and uncle and grandma. Like other kids his age, he loved basketball. Video games were a constant, too. He’d spend unhealthy quantities of time gaming with friends, talking shit on Skype while swapping Minecraft tips or playing FIFA. “When I was like 12, I started playing online games, and I found FIFA,” he says. “That’s when I realized how good Neymar was. Like, 2012 Neymar? That’s beautiful.”

A bunch of his friends were really into soccer so he watched them play. Then, he got in the mix himself. “I was like, ‘This is tactical, but this is also individual skill. This is everything,’” he says. “I watched Mesut Özil play. That’s how I became an Arsenal fan. He’s so good that he has a play style, which is like…you have to be double great. In music terms, that's like the greatest rapper making a [great] rock album. This guy is like, ‘I’m going to be unselfish. I’m not going to be known as this [one thing], but I can do all of these things.’ He makes the game look beautiful. He exemplifies what the sport is to me.”

It makes sense that Keem would admire a player who could do it all: be the star, but also blend into the background for the good of the team. From the beginning, his approach to music was similarly collaborative. He thought maybe he’d like to rap, but he couldn’t find any beats to rap on, so he started to make his own. His friends caught on, and “it kind of gamified making music,” he says. The marathon gaming sessions turned into marathon discussions about what they’d learned, or some new way to use a plug-in. 

The group built an artistic bond that was shielded from the rest of the world — until it wasn’t. “I started releasing music my freshman year. I remember being crucified…not crucified, but, well…a little bit crucified.” Keem smiles that miles-long smile, referring to the awkward period of teenage life when it feels uncool to try something new, to actively work toward a future. “People would make fun of it, but then you’d have the people who were like, ‘Oh, this is super cool.’ Those are the people I'm still friends with. By my junior year, all those kids who made fun of it would end up doing it.”

In 2015, Keem’s uncle was hit and killed by a truck. A lot of Keem’s extended family came out to the funeral, including some members, like Kendrick Lamar, whom he hadn’t kept in close touch with. He was just a teenager standing up there trying to get through his eulogy. Kendrick took notice and asked Keem to come out to LA. “Kendrick asked me, ‘Do you want to be a rapper, or do you want to be a producer?’” Keem recalls. “In my head, I was like, ‘I am a rapper.’” Keem started getting gigs producing for other artists in Kendrick’s orbit like Schoolboy Q and Jay Rock. 

There’s this photograph of a 16-year-old Keem and Kendrick that circulates online every so often. They’re crammed into a makeshift studio on a tour bus. Kendrick’s got his hood up, headphones on, a loose grip on a microphone. A young, bespectacled Keem is wearing a crisp white DAMN. shirt. He’s hunched over a laptop staring intently at the screen. “That was just me and him on a tour bus at 2 a.m.,” Keem says. “I came to tour after school finished. I would have my Jansport backpack, I would have my Audio Technica AT 2020, and I would have a computer. I would go on [Kendrick’s] bus, and I would just bug him. Literally, ‘Yo, here's my mic.’ That handheld mic that he's holding in that picture? It’s a $100 mic that my grandma bought. And then I would just play shit, just make stuff, make stuff, make stuff.” 

Keem would probably tell you that it worked out for him because he was always ready to get in where he fit in—on time and without ego. But Kendrick also intuited that Keem could be a real cultural force. What Kendrick saw in Keem at his uncle’s memorial was someone who reminded him of himself. Kendrick wrote to The New York Times that Keem was “[a reminder] of all the realities I faced which shaped who I am today. I watched Keem carry the burdens of everyone’s grief, including his own, all while maintaining the dignity and honor of his uncle. We’re merely a reflection of our leaders, and Keem led the family to a place of love, compassion, and closure.”

Since those early days with Kendrick, Baby Keem has honed his sound into a weird jumble of hyperactive rage rap juxtaposed with deeply candid and vivid recollections of his tumultuous life in Vegas — often on the same song. When he performs live, kids mosh to startling moments of lyrical whiplash: Keem moves seamlessly from bragging about his newest car to asking — no, threatening — to punch you in the face. Then he’ll throw in a line about his mother’s addiction, or what it was like to grow up without knowing if you’d have somewhere to sleep. His great feat is that, rather than allowing these emotional poles to cancel each other out, he lets them feed each other. It’s sometimes jarring, but it’s real. A contradictory portrait of a guy who has experienced more death and pain in his young life than anyone should have to experience ever.

In fact, the previous decade of Keem’s life contains so many ups and downs, famous collaborators, pivotal career moments, and sold-out tours, that it can be hard to find space to pierce the surface. That’s part of the point of Ca$ino’s candidness, and definitely the point of Booman, the three-part documentary about Keem’s early life, made up primarily of footage that Connie shot over the years. “I remember growing up with the camera,” Keem says. “But there was a point where I got conscious of it. It was a big staple of everything we would do. She wanted to be an actress.”