NBA YoungBoy Stands Alone
Few musical events in recent memory have promised more mayhem than this one: the first major headlining tour by YoungBoy Never Broke Again, a rapper of uncommon power and dexterity who is known to the disproportionately young and rowdy fans who love him as NBA YoungBoy. The tour began last month, with a pair of sold-out shows at the American Airlines Center, in Dallas, where the Mavericks play; soon after, videos of exuberant audiences began to circulate online. Not all of the excitement has been cheerful: during a show in Kansas City, a fourteen-year-old attendee was caught on tape assaulting a sixty-six-year-old usher, and was charged with felony and misdemeanor assault; dates in Chicago and Detroit have been cancelled, without much explanation. But when the tour arrived at the Prudential Center, in Newark, last week, the mood was festive, if chaotic. The arena was full of fans wearing black YoungBoy T-shirts and waving slime-green YoungBoy bandannas: they eschewed the seats, clogged the aisles, and rapped along with every word. The only person who didn’t seem to get carried away by the frenzy was the calm and rather dignified figure who inspired it. YoungBoy made his entrance standing inside a coffin that was lowered to the stage, and he unspooled his rhymes with the sorrow and stoicism of a guy who knew that, sooner or later, he would be right back where he started, only no longer standing.
At the dawn of YoungBoy’s career, he didn’t seem to be scared of anything. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child,” he sneered, in a track that was released in 2015, when he was only fifteen years old. He was lanky and serious-looking, with indentations on his forehead that were the result, he later explained, of a halo brace that had been screwed into his skull, after he broke his neck wrestling with friends at the age of four. He was also fiercely loyal to his home town, Baton Rouge; in the music video for “Murder,” from 2016, he and his friends posed in a modest-looking house, flaunting a little bit of cash and a lot of guns. The lyrics he delivered—“That shit that you talking ain’t fearing us / Fuck how you come, you ain’t seeing us”—were memorable because of his twangy Louisiana snarl, and because of the way he shifted between sprightly rapping and a bluesy moan that suggested misgivings beneath the bravado. “I’m terrified of people, and I’m very shy,” he said, in a whispery voice, during an extraordinary 2023 video interview with Billboard. “People are cruel. It’s like we can’t control ourself.”
In the past decade, YoungBoy has released an astonishing amount of music: more than three dozen full-length releases, including eight in 2022 alone. Along the way, he has built a huge audience online, especially on YouTube, without ever having had a mainstream hit; “Make No Sense,” from his excellent 2019 album “AI YoungBoy 2,” peaked at No. 57 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, but it has been streamed more than half a billion times on Spotify. Hip-hop conquered the globe decades ago, but the show in Newark was a reminder that the genre still hasn’t been fully digested, partly because it has maintained its singular relationship to tough Black neighborhoods like the one where YoungBoy grew up. Despite his popularity, he has relatively few ties to the broader world of popular music, and so the show had both the intimacy and the fervor of an underground gathering. Green lights made the stage glow, and the crowd chanted along as YoungBoy’s lyrics showed, over and over, the way steely resolve can melt into something softer: “They keep on dragging me, I play for keeps, they scared of me / I cannot barely—can barely sleep, or even breathe.” He has a knack for rhymes that are bracingly confessional, sometimes in two senses at once.
Many of the people devouring YoungBoy’s endless stream of new music have also been devouring news of his various altercations and legal cases. When he was seventeen, he was accused of taking part in a drive-by shooting. (He pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a firearm and received a suspended sentence.) When he was eighteen, he was accused of assaulting and kidnapping his girlfriend, a charge that seemed to be corroborated by surveillance footage. (He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to probation.) He has feuded with a number of rappers, some of whom were later shot and killed, and although YoungBoy has never been charged in connection with any of these deaths, fans have found it tempting to imagine that the threats in his lyrics reflect things he has really done, or might do in the future, if his many enemies aren’t careful. By the time the videographer from Billboard caught up with him, he was not in Louisiana but in snowy Utah, where he was trying to stay out of trouble: on house arrest, limited to three visitors at a time, awaiting trial on federal gun charges. He was found not guilty in one case and pleaded guilty in another; this past December, he was sentenced to twenty-three months in prison and five years of probation, although he was released from federal prison earlier this year. In May, President Trump pardoned him, freeing him from his probation, the terms of which might have made it impossible for him to mount a major tour like this one. On the Fourth of July, he released an album called “MASA,” which stands for Make America Slime Again. (It is one of three YoungBoy releases so far this year.) In hip-hop, “slime” can be a versatile term of fellowship, and YoungBoy’s title functions as both a boast and a Presidential shout-out. The album doesn’t have quite the same clarity or springy energy as his very best work, but it has plenty of charisma and a few left turns, none lefter than “XXX,” which borrows its refrain—“Sex and violence!”—from an old punk band called the Exploited, and which contains a brusque political endorsement. “Whatever Trump doing, bitch, it’s good for the young’uns,” YoungBoy declares, although the rest of the album suggests that he himself is still plenty interested in doing bad.
YoungBoy’s stage name gets less appropriate every year: he turns twenty-six in a few weeks, and he is the father of at least ten children by eight different women. (A particularly sweet and tuneful track called “Kacey Talk” is named after one of his sons, not because the lyrics are about fatherhood but, YoungBoy later explained, because he happened to be holding his son when he recorded it.) In Newark, it seemed as if he had been changed by his time spent locked up and on house arrest—not so much reformed by these experiences as haunted by them. The major stage prop, besides the coffin, was a small house with a zig-zagging line running horizontally around it so that it could crack open like a colossal egg, with YoungBoy trapped within the shell. In this context, even a simple boast about wielding a Beretta sounded mournful. “I just pulled my ’Retta out and tried to stop a nigga / I just walked outside my house and almost shot a nigga,” YoungBoy rapped, in a downcast track called “House Arrest Tingz,” which unfolds, perhaps, from the perspective of a guy whose antisocial tendencies are exacerbated by his isolated circumstance.
