Meet Suki Baby, The Woman on the Cover of Drake and 21 Savage’s ‘Her Loss’
After the success of their hit collab “Jimmy Cooks” in summer 2022, rappers Drake and 21 Savage linked up for a new collaborative album titled Her Loss. The album cover is a photo of Suki Baby, a well-known figure on social media. Suki, as well as the photo on the cover, go way back before the album’s release.
Suki Baby, the album’s cover star, is an adult dancer in Houston
Quiana Yasuka, known to the world as Suki Baby, currently works as an adult dancer in Houston, Texas. In February 2021, Suki sat down with host Gulniyal on her gtalks! podcast to discuss her career and more. In the interview, she revealed that she also runs her own nail business and that she first started doing nails when she was in high school. She also loves grills and teeth jewelry, and her interest runs deep: she even has books on teeth anatomy to gain a better understanding of the human mouth and grills can be shaped to different people’s teeth. She’s also a photographer, selling prints on her website of photos she takes.
According to Complex, Suki is of Japanese, Black, and Cherokee descent and has moved around a bit throughout her life. She was born in North Carolina and spent her younger years in Japan; as a result, Japanese is her first language. She eventually moved to Houston and settled on being in America permanently after dealing with bullying in high school: as the only Black and Japanese student at her school, she faced racist ridicule.
The photo on the cover of ‘Her Loss’ is 3 years old
Suki Baby has had a following online for years. But her appearance on Drake and 21 Savage’s Her Loss album cover wasn’t something that came about around the album’s release: the photo was actually taken three years before the album’s release in November 2022. On the album cover, she’s pictured in a close-up of her face, complete with baby hairs and tooth jewelry on her two front teeth as well as long eyelashes and a bandage on her cheek.
The photographer, Paris Aden, told Complex that Drake’s OVO record label reached out to her out of the blue and asked to use the photo for the album cover. “Drake just saw the photo I guess, and they asked if they could use it for the album,” Aden explained. “I shot that s*** a long time ago. It was her profile pic and he probably fell in love with what he seen.”
Lil Yachty chose the album cover
While Drake’s team is the one who reached out to Aden to use her photo of Suki Baby, it wasn’t Drake’s idea originally to use the photo for the album. Rapper Lil Yachty, who co-wrote the songs “Backoutsideboyz,” “Privileged Rappers,” “P**** & Millions” (with Travis Scott), and “Jumbotron S*** Poppin’,” revealed on Instagram that he was the one who found the photo and selected it for the cover.
“I chose this cover because this photo is so raw… So authentic.. Not fabricated,” Yachty wrote. “Suki can and will only be Suki.”
