Management firm 11AM NYC’s midtown Manhattan offices are abuzz on a Wednesday afternoon. Plaques for hit releases by A$AP Ferg and Lil TJay adorn the walls, and employees are moving about, hoping to help Queens rapper Bay Swag earn one of his own for his upcoming debut album, Damaged Thoughts (out July 25 on United Masters with a documentary to follow).
The office’s air conditioner is on the fritz during my visit, which means the office is baking on this 86-degree day. But Bay Swag and his four-person team are keeping it cool inside the main conference room. He greets me gregariously; I’ve met young artists who haven’t yet assumed the social responsibilities of being a star, but Bay isn’t one of them. He has a natural alacrity, and he’s also been around the music industry since he was nine, when trips to the Queens strip club Starlets weren’t out of the question.
“I was scared, bro,” he jokes of his first time at Starlets. “My uncle had me in there. I’m like, ‘No, I’m gonna get in trouble with my mom!’ I’m nine years old, it’s girls shakin’ ass everywhere.”
His manager Derben Chrisphonte comedically interjects, “I was there,” adding that he’s 15 years older than Bay, who’s “always been around” him and older peers. “We had a dog and a kid in the club. A French Bulldog,” the manager marvels. “I never hung out with kids my age,” Bay adds. “I was always with my big cousins.”
That’s not entirely true; he tells me about middle-school years spent enjoying the competition and camaraderie of playing organized basketball, football, soccer, and baseball with fellow kids in the Little Neck section of Queens. But in time, his adolescence was shaped by private jet rides with Diddy’s son Christian “King” Combs, whose CYN collective Bay Swag joined in 2015. He also frequently met stars at the warehouse for renowned New York clothing brand SlowBucks, where his uncle Windsor “Slow” Lubin hosted “literally every rapper, every actor, every whoever” who came through New York.
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Another key figure in his early life was his father, Lloyd “Bay Lloyd” McKenzie. Bay Swag tells me fondly about grabbing Chinese food with his father, and playfully singing the intro to Jay-Z’s “Song Cry” while riding through the city. Bay Lloyd is a party promoter from Queens who’s worked with A Tribe Called Quest: He’s in the 1993 video for “Electric Relaxation” as a waiter, and he has a production credit on “Busta’s Lament” from the group’s 1998 album The Love Movement. He also toured with Tribe and Swizz Beats, forging industry connections for both himself and his son. Passingly, Bay reveals that his dad “made” radio DJs play his early songs on the radio; anybody who can pull that off carries a lot of respect.
Bay Swag tells me that New York rap icons like Jim Jones, Juelz Santana, and Jadakiss, as well as Philly rapper Meek Mill, essentially watched him grow up and are still just a phone call away. He strikingly resembles his father, and it’s worth wondering how much of Bay Lloyd those artists see in Bay Swag.
In 2017, Lloyd was convicted for allegedly ordering the 2012 murder of law student Brandon Woodward. Reports framed the murder as a $161,000 drug deal gone bad. The McKenzie family believes he was wrongfully convicted. As their petition on Change.org puts it, “LLoyd McKenzie is presently [serving] time on a 85 years sentence for a crime he DID NOT COMMIT NOR HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF.” On 2017’s “Saucin,” Bay Swag raps, “Daddy got locked ’cause my daddy was trappin’/They tried to say he killed a nigga in Manhattan/Jury believed the nigga that was rattin’/I’ma get you out, Pops, swear I ain’t cappin’.” Currently-incarcerated Chicago rapper Lil Durk jumped on the remix and rapped about his own father’s incarceration.
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Bay Swag says “Saucin” was his graduation from a lithe-voiced teenager exploring his craft into a young adult with a defined creative approach. He started rapping at 13, when his father had him record over reference tracks he had procured. But after his father’s incarceration, Bay Swag had to make his own songs, crafting verses in his head (a practice he continues to this day). That development has led to Damaged Thoughts, a project he says is as much about introspection as it is about fun songs like “Caicos” and “Matte Black Master.”
“My thoughts were damaged a lot from just growing up seeing the things I’ve seen,” he says. “Just having to deal with so much hate and envy.” Snacking on his second fun-size bag of Welch’s fruit snacks, he explains more what he means by that.
He tells me about how a heartbreak frayed his perception of romance: “I might think a girl is doing something [devious], and she might not be. I have a lot of girl friends. I see what they do, so I’m like, ‘Damn, is my girl doing this?’” The late Philly artist PnB Rock was a friend, and Bay Swag laments that in 2022 he was killed while simply eating a meal at an L.A. Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. “That fucked me up,” he says. “Being an artist is the most dangerous shit in the world. You gotta post where you’re going to be… Shit crazy, bro.”
The album’s title track is the most personal, as he raps about his mom’s cancer diagnosis (he tells us that she’s since “beat it”) and rhymes, “Sometimes I be lost in my thoughts with my friends/But it’s not my fault, ‘cause I don’t talk about my problems” over a heartfelt vocal sample. The line is true to life, he admits, telling me, ”Music is therapy. I don’t talk with people [about hard times], so I just rap about it.”
The result is a holistic project that marks him as an artist willing to dig deep. There’s a scene in the upcoming Spike Lee film Highest II Lowest where Denzel Washington, playing a record executive, demands that a posturing artist shed his swagger and be vulnerable. The moment speaks to the throng of rappers who are quick to rap about violence or be braggadocious but won’t always admit the trauma that such bravado conceals. Damaged Thoughts shows Swag never needed that memo. When I ask him how he manages to have the fun he has on the album while going through some of the turmoil he rhymes about, he smiles and says, “I don’t know,” while shaking his head. “A day at a time,” Maria Gracia, a senior marketing director at his label, adds.
He’s wearing a white hockey jersey and designer jeans, though he might be changing for the video shoot in Teaneck, New Jersey, that he’s headed to after our holistic interview. Swaying back and forth in his roller chair, he makes consistent eye contact, and after expressing himself sometimes asks, “You get what I’m tryna say?” in a way that doesn’t feel like a knee-jerk punctuation, but a genuine desire to have a two-way conversation.
Even without his lineage, Bay probably would have won over many of the artists in his vast network. Damaged Thoughts boasts appearances from 42 Dugg, Sheff G, Meek Mill, Quavo, Kyle Ricch, and Young Thug. Bay Swag recorded “Lil Jasmine” with the latter artist before the YSL indictment, and says they have since recorded another song alongside Ty Dolla $ign. He counts Thug as a friend who once offered to pay for his father’s lawyer.
And, of course Bay, Swag gets slizzy alongside Cash Cobain on the smooth “Don’t Care No More” and bouncy “Caicos,” which has a similar island vibe to Cash’s bubbling “Feeeeeeeeel” single. When I ask Bay Swag about the first rap song he fell in love with, he mentions Nas and AZ’s “How Ya Livin’,” saying he loved their back-and-forth rhymes and enjoys emulating that format alongside Cash.
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Many were first introduced to Bay Swag’s music when he featured on Cash’s “Fisherrr,” a silky track that helped set off last summer. Bay Swag says he thinks people love the sexy drill movement because people “feel good” listening to it, and it’s danceable without being violent. As I wrote in 2022, it’s an offshoot of drill where listeners can have fun shimmying and mimicking the slithery cadences without worrying about lyrics dissing dead people or other borderline themes. Bay Swag is a notable figure in that shift, entrenching his name in the fabric of New York culture in the same way his father did years ago.
He shows me a promotional clip for the album where he notes, “If [my father] would’ve never went through that, went to jail, had life in prison, I would’ve never had that hustle. I would’ve never had that drive. That made me become the man of the house, at a young age too.” New York City, like so much of America, is plagued by the justice system’s systematic thrusting of parents from homes, sparking changes of fortune that only sometimes lead to triumphs like Bay Swag’s. Hopefully, we can reach a world where more artists can find their greatness without having to prove their resilience amid tumult. But in this one, Bay Swag is yet another example that it’s possible.
