The 2020s File Feature
How It Feels
How It Feels: Lil Baby, Lil Durk, and the Voice of Street Survival "How It Feels," recorded by Lil Baby and Lil Durk and released in 2021 as part of their jo…
01 The Story
How It Feels: Lil Baby, Lil Durk, and the Voice of Street Survival
"How It Feels," recorded by Lil Baby and Lil Durk and released in 2021 as part of their joint studio album The Voice of the Heroes, arrived at a moment when both rappers stood at the absolute apex of the trap music world. The collaboration represented the convergence of two artists who had spent the preceding decade grinding through the streets of Atlanta and Chicago respectively, transforming personal hardship into chart-dominating rap music. Their chemistry on this particular track distilled everything that made the partnership so compelling: parallel life experiences, complementary vocal textures, and an unflinching willingness to address the psychological weight of surviving environments that claimed so many people around them.
The track debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 34 on the chart dated June 19, 2021, a strong opening that reflected both the considerable streaming base each artist had cultivated and the immediate fan response to the album's release. The Voice of the Heroes debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 during the same chart cycle, and "How It Feels" benefited enormously from that commercial momentum, pulling fans deeper into an album that critics had already identified as a landmark collaborative effort within contemporary trap. The song charted for three weeks total before falling away, a trajectory consistent with a deep album cut riding the wave of a debut surge rather than a conventional radio single.
Lil Baby, born Dominique Armani Jones in Atlanta, Georgia in 1994, had transformed himself from a street figure with multiple arrests into one of the most commercially successful rappers of his generation in a remarkably compressed timeframe. His 2017 mixtape Perfect Timing announced his arrival, and subsequent projects including Harder Than Ever and My Turn turned him into a streaming phenomenon. By 2021 he had accumulated multiple platinum certifications, Grammy nominations, and a reputation as one of the sharpest commercial instincts in rap music, capable of generating enormous streaming numbers seemingly at will.
Lil Durk, born Durk Derrick Banks in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood in 1992, followed a parallel trajectory rooted in the drill music scene that had emerged from Chicago in the early 2010s. His Only the Family collective and his long-running mixtape series had made him a regional legend before crossover success came with later projects. By the time he connected with Lil Baby on this album, Durk had proven himself not just as a rapper but as one of the genre's more emotionally resonant voices, someone who could communicate grief, loyalty, and trauma with a specificity that resonated far beyond hip-hop's core audience.
The pairing had been years in the making. The two artists had appeared on each other's projects before The Voice of the Heroes formalized the collaboration into a full joint album. Their bond was reportedly grounded in genuine friendship and mutual respect, and listeners could hear that comfort in the ease with which they passed verses back and forth throughout the project. "How It Feels" in particular exemplified the way the two artists could address nearly identical thematic territory, street survival and the psychological aftermath of loss, while maintaining entirely distinct voices and approaches.
Production on the track came from the team of Quay Global and OG Parker, two producers who had become central figures in the Atlanta trap sound. Quay Global had contributed to major records across multiple years in the genre, while OG Parker had established himself as one of the most sought-after beatmakers in the scene. Together they constructed a soundscape characterized by melodic piano figures, heavy sub-bass, and the kind of atmospheric percussion that had become standard in premium trap production by the early 2020s. The beat gave both rappers the emotional space their subject matter demanded without becoming overwrought.
The album The Voice of the Heroes received broadly positive reviews from critics who noted its unusual coherence for a joint project. Unlike many rap collaborations where the seams showed between artists with different aesthetics, Lil Baby and Lil Durk seemed to have found a common wavelength that made the record feel genuinely unified. Complex, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone all noted the project's emotional weight and the authenticity of the two rappers' engagement with their material. "How It Feels" earned specific mention in several reviews as a highlight that demonstrated the artists at their most unguarded.
The song accumulated over 46 million YouTube views, a figure that placed it solidly within the broader cultural footprint of an album that resonated well beyond its initial release window. Both artists' fanbases proved loyal streamers, returning to the project repeatedly over the months following its release, and "How It Feels" became one of the album's signature moments precisely because it so directly addressed the emotional reality that defined both men's understanding of their lives and careers.
The title phrase itself encapsulates the track's central project: articulating an emotional truth that defies easy summarization. The feeling in question is not a single clean emotion but rather a complex tangle of gratitude, grief, vigilance, and a deep awareness of contingency. Both Lil Baby and Lil Durk had lost close friends and associates to gun violence, and that loss informed their music in ways that went beyond simple tribute. The track is in many ways a meditation on what it means to succeed when the people who shaped you did not survive to see that success.
By 2021, the trap genre had matured to the point where artists like Lil Baby and Lil Durk could address these themes with considerable nuance. The earlier generation of trap had often relied on bravado and shock as primary modes, but the mid-2010s had seen the genre develop more introspective capabilities, partly through the influence of figures like Young Thug and Future and partly through the simple fact that an entire generation of artists had now lived long enough to carry real grief. "How It Feels" sits squarely in that tradition of mature emotional reckoning delivered through trap's sonic architecture.
The commercial success of The Voice of the Heroes and the sustained streaming performance of "How It Feels" reinforced both artists' standing as figures who could credibly claim to speak for a generation shaped by specific forms of urban American experience. The song's Billboard Hot 100 presence, brief though it was, confirmed that this kind of emotionally direct street rap could reach the mainstream charts without sacrificing the specificity that made it meaningful to its core audience.
Legacy and Cultural Placement
"How It Feels" endures as one of the more emotionally substantial moments in either artist's catalog, a track where the commercial calculation that governs so much contemporary rap receded in favor of genuine expression. Its place within The Voice of the Heroes, an album that has been consistently cited as one of the essential collaborative rap records of the early 2020s, ensures that it remains accessible to listeners who continue to discover the project years after its initial release.
The partnership between Lil Baby and Lil Durk that produced this track has continued in subsequent years, with both artists guesting on each other's projects and maintaining a public friendship that is itself something of a statement about the possibilities for solidarity and mutual support within an industry and a cultural context where those things cannot be taken for granted. "How It Feels" stands as one of the clearest expressions of what that partnership produced at its most earnest.
02 Song Meaning
How It Feels: Survival, Grief, and the Weight of Making It Out
"How It Feels" operates as a sustained meditation on what it means to emerge from environments defined by danger, poverty, and loss. The central emotional terrain of the song is not triumph in any clean sense but rather the complicated aftermath of survival, the recognition that success arrived alongside, and often because of, experiences that left permanent marks. Lil Baby and Lil Durk address this territory with the kind of specificity that comes only from living through it, and the track's meaning is inseparable from the autobiographical credibility both rappers bring to it.
The title phrase gestures at something that resists straightforward articulation. The "feeling" the song describes is not euphoria or gratitude alone but a far more ambivalent emotional state, one that encompasses awareness of how close things came to going differently, grief for those who did not make it, and the persistent vigilance of someone who cannot fully exhale even in moments of material comfort. This emotional complexity is characteristic of the more mature strain of trap music that both artists represent, a mode that has moved beyond celebration of material acquisition toward something more psychologically honest.
Both rappers came from environments where the mortality rate among peers was high, and that awareness permeates the track. Durk's Chicago Englewood background and Baby's Atlanta street experience converge in this song as parallel testimonies to the same underlying reality: success in rap did not erase the past or insulate them from its ongoing consequences. Friends were still dying. Family members were still in precarious situations. The money and the fame existed alongside the grief, and the song is largely about navigating that coexistence.
There is also a dimension of loyalty in the song's meaning, a commitment to not forgetting where one came from and to maintaining the bonds forged in earlier, harder circumstances. Both Lil Baby and Lil Durk are known within the hip-hop community for their emphasis on loyalty to their respective crews and communities, and "How It Feels" carries that value explicitly. The song is in part a testament to the people who shaped both artists, including those no longer alive to witness the success their influence helped produce.
The production's emotional register, heavy bass beneath melodic piano figures, creates a sonic environment that supports this thematic weight without tipping into melodrama. Quay Global and OG Parker constructed a soundscape that feels both grand and intimate, matching the ambition of the subject matter with beats that have room to breathe. The musical setting reinforces the lyrical content by creating an atmosphere where reflection feels appropriate rather than forced.
The song also speaks to what might be called the performance demands of success from difficult backgrounds. Both rappers are expected by the public and the industry to represent specific experiences authentically while simultaneously succeeding in a commercial context that has its own rules and expectations. "How It Feels" navigates this tension by refusing to perform either uncomplicated street credibility or uncomplicated mainstream aspiration. Instead it inhabits the space between those poles where most of the complicated emotional truth actually lives.
The track's place within The Voice of the Heroes is significant. The album title itself signals a self-awareness about the role both artists play within their communities, voices for people whose stories are rarely told with this kind of commercial reach. "How It Feels" is one of the album's clearest expressions of that role, a song that attempts to communicate something true about a mode of American experience that mainstream culture has historically either ignored or sensationalized.
Ultimately, the meaning of "How It Feels" is rooted in the gap between external appearance and internal experience. From the outside, the success of Lil Baby and Lil Durk by 2021 looked like a clear victory narrative. But the song insists on the interior complexity of that narrative, the ongoing grief, the hypervigilance that does not simply switch off when the circumstances change, and the bittersweet quality of achievement when so many of the people who should have been celebrating are absent. That insistence on interior truth over surface narrative is what gives the track its lasting emotional power.
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