Youngboy Never Broke Again Untouchable Meek Mill
Critic's Notebook
YoungBoy Never Bankrupt Again Brings Back Rap Realism
Over the past few years, hip-hop has been swinging from one pole to the other. On ane end, you take the melodic sensualists — Drake and post-Drake — who baked in the songwriting and emotion of R&B and pop to brand hip-hop a globally attainable force. Lately, at the other end, have come up the rowdy genre-bashing eccentrics, who've rebaptized the genre as punk, psychedelia or both.
In this climate, the path chosen by the impressive young Baton Rouge, La., rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again feels near nostalgic. He's a clinical realist, sober and unfussy. It's an approach long out of vogue, not dominant since the tardily 1980s into the mid-1990s, the days of Scarface, Tupac Shakur, Kool G Rap and more. But perhaps given hip-hop'southward increasing malleability, its serious, reflective, streetwise arm is primed for a return.
With YoungBoy Never Broke Again, the heaviness is visible in his eyes. You can see it in a recent interview with Mass Appeal in which he talked about the violence in Baton Rouge, and its awful gravitational pull: "Information technology'due south either jail or decease, like, literally. Ain't no living out there."
Where YoungBoy Never Broke Over again finds oxygen is in his music — he is 17, and already one of the most promising young Southern rappers of the past couple of years, an intuitive songwriter who salts his bravado with in-looking seriousness.
"AI YoungBoy," his latest mixtape, which he released this calendar month, is his best so far. It comes just three months afterward he was released from prison having pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a firearm, dodging attempted murder charges.
As on his breakout mixtape, "38 Baby," there is a ferocious rowdiness at the core of "AI YoungBoy." YoungBoy Never Bankrupt Again has a way of gliding and bouncing atop melancholic keyboard-rooted production. His affair-of-factness is hit — it sounds like the production of concision, not uncertainty. Often, he achieves a lot with only a few words: "In the Maybach lonely, I don't need nobody," he insists on "Came From," one of the standouts, not boasting so much every bit shrugging. "Left Manus Right Paw," the brawniest song here, all the same sparkles with bully detail: "I'm washing the balance off of my nails."
"In that prison cell realized I ain't got no friends," YoungBoy Never Bankrupt Again raps on "Nighttime Into Low-cal." On 2 songs, "No Fume" and "Untouchable," he shows penitence for the trauma he's put his female parent through. Sometimes, as on "Twilight," he oozes into an offhand kind of singing, amateurish and deeply felt.
There are flickers of the Billy Rouge titans Lil Boosie and Kevin Gates in his melodic approach, only YoungBoy Never Broke Again — his name was originally NBA YoungBoy, just he changed it to one less likely to be legally contested — has more in common with an occasional moralist like Kodak Black, another young Southern rapper recently released from jail. He also has some of the bleakness that'due south been central to the rising of 21 Savage, who raps with an almost gothic severity.
"Untouchable" was the showtime song he put out after his release, and he used information technology to delineate the challenge he was facing: "Just a few days ago I was locked upwardly in them chains/Now I'm in dorsum of the Maybach with a lot of bands." On "Graffiti," he laments, "You know I got money but I'm in a hole/Scared I'ma die when I'm out on the road."
On the road is where he wants to exist, or perchance needs to be — anything but beingness back in Billy Rouge. At every turn, his supporters are urging him away from his hometown. When he was released from prison, Lil Boosie congratulated him on Instagram, but added a concerned warning: "Leave Br asap."
At the commencement of the video for "Untouchable," YoungBoy Never Bankrupt Once again shows a clip of a conversation he had with Meek Mill right after his release. "You lot gotta move or you gonna dice," Meek Factory warns him. It'due south said with insistence and a filial tenderness. Not that many years ago, Meek Manufactory, likewise a lucid tough-talker, was in the same position, and despite having come up far, his career has stalled; he'south not quite the star he might have been in an earlier time. For YoungBoy Never Broke Again, he is both a role model and a cautionary tale.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/arts/music/youngboy-never-broke-again-ai-youngboy.html
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