Baton Rouge rapper YoungBoy NeverBrokeAgain — often known as NBA YoungBoy to hip-hop followers within the know — doesn’t often take pleasure in talking to different human beings. As he instructed the author Meaghan Garvey in Billboard, “I’m not big on people.” YoungBoy’s a quiet soul — deeply intense and deeply delicate — with an unfiltered abundance of demons and an exacting reward for primitively sharing these demons in his music.
One approach to keep away from seeing folks is to spend your days on home arrest on a mountainside. YoungBoy’s been dwelling in Utah since 2021 after his attorneys satisfied a decide that the person born Kentrell DeSean Gaulden would keep out of hassle if he was dwelling within the state that has decriminalized polygamy. Now that he’s gone from the opening in East Baton Rouge jails to the snowy tranquility of Salt Lake City, he is perhaps able to relax. YoungBoy is not taking demonic and upsetting images along with his cellmates in jail; thank God for that. The typically alarming rapper in any other case often known as “Top” has settled right into a routine, by design. He did the duvet story for Billboard, was interviewed by the hip-hop podcast Rap Radar. It appears that YoungBoy is popping a leaf — nevertheless tiny and rusty that leaf is perhaps.
Complexities and reverse traits exist in rappers like YoungBoy, who eat their self-destruction for lunch. He’s tender spoken away from the sales space, however on the mic, he’s absurdly off-kilter and explosive. YoungBoy has a mind that causes him to blurt out exclamations uncontrollably and bitterly, becoming phrases into locations the place rappers often relaxation. There’s no adverse area with YoungBoy, simply an overwhelming and neurotypical brashness: You don’t know whether or not he’ll yell at you or be so devastatingly uncooked that you should gingerly rub his again. Sometimes each of these phenomena occur on the similar time.
YoungBoy is fluent in being fluid: a freak with a gun and a brute with an advanced and unflinching soul. On an album like final October’s 3800 Degrees, that erratic syntax works nicely due to the manufacturing palette that the album belongs to. It’s a much less refined spin on the No Limit Records albums from the late ’90s. The album cowl, which was impressed by Junvenile’s 400 Degreez, has a ’90s really feel too.
YoungBoy usually works finest when the beats and tune construction are concise and subsequently the albums are as nicely. On a strategic and advertising and marketing stage, he has used, typically cynically, his violent and thorny previous to his benefit. (Some of his followers appear to typically assume YoungBoy is a jailed political prisoner at instances, even when the FBI did make a tactical resolution to arrest him). Sometimes, he must apply restraint in his compulsive musicality. 3800 Degrees clocked in at about 34 minutes, a critic’s dream; it’s nonetheless genuinely his finest document since 2019’s AI YoungBoy 2 — the second the place you understand that the rapping of YoungBoy can nonetheless outshine folks’s glorification of his hectic and troublesome life. (I’m not above this both. As we realized from the grim and stunning “Notti Bop,” the tantalization between real-life violence and creative slapstick humor remains to be prevalent, like the usage of the Fruit of Islam as safety).
On Friday, YoungBoy launched Richest Opp, his third launch this yr alone. It’s his finest work out of the three — YoungBoy tends to focus as soon as each three tries, or one thing like that — one other instance of each his glorious artistry and the way irritating he may be to comply with and help. As regular, the antics on tune like “Fuck The Industry Pt. 2” (extra on that momentarily) makes the slick songwriting and cotton-candy candy Louisiana cadence on “Bitch Let’s Do It” really feel inconsequential. Sometimes, like on 2021’s Sincerely, Kentrell, YoungBoy’s alternative of manufacturing can nonetheless be formulaic. He’s not above getting too proud of the bassline like LaVine along with his jumper. But at finest, that low finish supplies him with a circulation to melt the blow of his threatening volatility. And “I Heard,” observe three, is a big blow, of the Mike Tyson selection: “I held it down from top to bottom/ These hoes be laughin’ at my trauma/ I say, I got serious problems, I say, I wan’ kill somebody.”
If YoungBoy’s expertise is within the erratically polemical subjects of his vinegarish raps, then contemplate him a Sandler character for the best way he can burn scorching. “Just Flow” remembers the sing-along circulation of Kevin Gates. “Father” throws a warning shot — plus says a prayer — at rappers who assume that they’ll diss YoungBoy, who isn’t having it. But the tune that has YoungBoy within the information once more is “Fuck The Industry Pt. 2,” on which he disses a protracted record of rappers together with Drake, J. Cole, Lil Yachty, and Lil Durk — a frequent goal. On the tune, YB claims that Drake gained’t work with him due to the Toronto pop star’s friendship with Lil Durk, says J. Cole ghosted him after YB missed a studio session, and calls Lil Yachty an anti-gay slur. Because of songs like this, no one is now discussing the comparatively stable document. YoungBoy’s propensity for battle is overriding his expertise. He’s identified in the beginning as an emotional and thoughtless sprayer of exterior strife, not a prodigious vessel for Southern rap ballads.
All of this isn’t to say YoungBoy is just not nonetheless enthralling. As proven on “Slimes Go Where I Go,” he’s undeniably so. Richest Opp comprises some spectacular moments; to hear is to blur the road between shock worth and ordinarily stupefied ache. If YB is popping his life round, and if his acidity and depth proceed to be celebrated, then his errors and lashes should be accounted for. Can he present us that with out making enemies, and doing issues he can’t come again from? That’s the million greenback query coming from Utah, the place the place he’s chilling out, hoping he can lastly defeat his demons.
SILENCERS, INFRAREDS, AND OFFICIAL SHIT