The first thing to know about YoungBoy Never Broke Again, or NBA YoungBoy, is that he does most of his talking in verse. The teenage rapper from Baton Rouge is quiet outside his raps, which teem with pent-up aggression and anxiety. Because of this, many songs read like journal entries. He spills his guts in a grisly drawl still coated in a nasally boyish rasp, constantly negotiating the terms of innocence and indecency. When he was 4 years old, he broke his neck play-wrestling, and he still has scars on his face from the brace that held his head up while he healed. After dropping out of school in 9th grade, YoungBoy turned to crime, and was booked for robbery. This path escalated quickly last year when he was arrested on two counts of attempted first-degree murder, later pleading down to aggravated assault with a firearm. The murder charge came just as he was gaining traction with 38 Baby, a singsongy mixtape of cold pronouncements from a kid resigned to the violent cycle that governs his city’s rap scene.
A week after his release from jail, YoungBoy shared “Untouchable,” a post-prison screed of resilience and prosperity. “I didn’t really mean untouchable because you are touchable,” he explained. “The only thing stopping me is jail or death now. Either you’re going to see me on the sideline or you’re gonna come get rid of us.” YoungBoy seems cognizant of how real the latter threat is, for the video opens with an urgent FaceTime advisory from Meek Mill: “You gotta move or you gon’ die.” Now free and ready to realize his promise, he’s growing sharper, flowing effortlessly. YoungBoy’s new mixtape, AI YoungBoy, is an intense and emotional collection about finding new power in freedom, dedicating oneself to craft as a means of escape, enduring betrayal, and having a complicated relationship with home and the people searching for meaning there. He wants out, but the prospect of a shootout is still constantly lurking.
YoungBoy is primarily influenced by late Trill Entertainment wunderkind Lil Phat, a 19-year-old rapper killed in a murder-for-hire plot outside a Georgia hospital waiting for his daughter to be born. YoungBoy isn’t unlike Lil Phat; both Baton Rouge-born teenage shooters were implicated in robberies as juveniles, and rapped about juuging as a means to feed broken families. But retaliatory violence and real talk are far more focal to YoungBoy’s outlook. In this respect, he is a disciple of Boosie Badazz and Kevin Gates, Baton Rouge cult heroes with rap sheets who relive street life through gritted teeth. None are wordsmiths, but they are all illustrators, and YoungBoy can be nearly as visceral. He sometimes embodies one or the other, on songs like “Murda Gang” and “Ride on Em,” which channel their respective energies. Then there’s the croaking “Left Hand Right Hand,” his first clear-cut hit, which clearly embodies Gates.
These are the voices that inform YoungBoy’s, but he has a style and charisma all his own. His early work was less defined and somewhat limited in tone, but on AI YoungBoy he evolves as a writer and rapper, and he begins to realize his versatility. He refuses to mold himself in the image of any one artist (he once rapped, “I ain’t never had a role model, watched Chief Keef growing up”), and here he mixes spacey outsider trap and local country blues. He is as comfortable flexing in his shoot ‘em ups and he is decompressing in his half-ballads (“No. 9,” “Twilight”).
There is a remorselessness to YoungBoy’s murder threats that can be chilling (especially given his circumstances), but he has a softer side that complicates him. “Gotta keep my head above water, gotta make it through/I do this shit for my momma and my lil brother too,” he raps on “Untouchable.” Then there are heart-stopping admissions like this one on “Graffiti”: “You know I got money but I’m in a hole/Scared I’ma die when I’m out on the road.” These moving flashes of accountability and paranoia reveal a teenager indoctrinated by the streets, seeking an escape hatch. In this light, the chest-puffing “No Smoke” and the bouncy, gun-brandishing romp “GG” come off as necessary warnings and preemptive strikes, measures taken in self-defense. All at once, his music communicates the ways hood masculinity corrupts and guards black boys.
