Fifteen billion YouTube streams.
One hundred Billboard charting singles.
One hundred and twenty-six RIAA certified platinum songs.
Thirty-four Billboard charting albums.
Surely, we’re discussing Taylor Swift here, right? Beyoncé, perhaps? Drake? Prince? The Eagles? Mariah Carey? The Beatles? Possibly even Michael Jackson?
But you should know, right? This is the type of mainstream superstardom that makes waves, makes household names, steps on stage at SNL, rocks the Super Bowl. This artist rivals Drake and has lapped Kendrick Lamar many, many times over. And you hear about those two all the time. Jay-Z, a superstar you have certainly heard of, once rapped, “Numbers don’t lie.” And Jay-Z himself would kill for those numbers. So why have you, dear reader, never heard of someone statistically proven to be a top-selling superstar in current American music? Are you just too old? Are your fingers no longer on the pulse? Are you too cultured for your own good? Did you miss a New York Magazine feature somewhere?
Breathe easy. You can be fully forgiven for never having heard of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. Because it remains a confusing fact that one of the top-selling rappers of all-time, and therefore one of the top-selling artists, period, has only been the subject of one significant New York Times article, and this came only after he was too massive to ignore any longer. YoungBoy Never Broke Again was not interviewed for that article, and though the reporter seems to have made his way into a studio session, he didn’t get a single quote. The article was basically a concert review, with the reporter noticeably shocked at the 18,000-strong crowd screaming back every word of every song, and oddly focusing on how YoungBoy smokes Newports.
The Times reporter wonders why the New York Times has been ignoring an all-time top-selling rapper. How did he get here? And, most importantly, how did he do it without us? Published in November of 2025, at a time when YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s Billboard reign was becoming impossible to ignore, the article was titled: “NBA YoungBoy, Rap’s Defining 2025 Superstar, Is Hiding in Plain Sight.” Or in other words, “We Don’t Understand Why Or How This Person Is Popular, And Therefore He Shouldn’t Be Popular.” Same for the lone New Yorker article, which was actually titled — wait for it — “NBA YoungBoy Stands Alone.” Which would be accurate if “alone” was defined as having hundreds of millions of worldwide fans, several McMansions full of day one friends and managers and blunt rollers and young men with big guns all ready to do your bidding at a moment’s notice. Essentially, what the New Yorker means by “alone” here is that YoungBoy Never Broke Again doesn’t need them. Nor does he need any of the legacy media press gauntlets every other superstar at his level had to walk through on their way to household recognition. So you’re not on the hook. You’re not as out of touch as you thought you were when reading this essay’s opening. YoungBoy Never Broke Again is a superstar that has been hidden from you by the ignorance of the mainstream media. This is as confusing as it is infuriating. But unlike that grudging New York Times piece, in this space we’re going to try to get to the bottom of why. So strap in. Roll up a blunt. It gets real ugly.
The Devil’s Radar
Let’s get something out of the way right from the start: YoungBoy Never Broke Again makes excellent music. It may not be your cup of chai latte, but pull up his top five popular songs on Spotify and you will hear hooks for days and days. Everything is a hook with YoungBoy Never Broke Again. The choruses are packed with hooks, the verses are hooks, the beat is a hook, the intro is a hook, the outro is a hook. The songs may not speak to you specifically, but you will be humming them for hours against your will. And if there’s one thing YoungBoy Never Broke Again has, it’s songs. There are thousands of them spread across traditional streaming platforms, YouTube and all social media nooks and crannies. The officially released tracks are only the tip of the iceberg, since YoungBoy’s many thousands of fans trade leaks and snippets like kids in the 50s traded baseball cards. There’s an entire black market of unreleased YoungBoy tracks that has taken on an obsessive life of its own that rivals Grateful Dead fanatics trading show tapes. And none of this would be happening if the songs weren’t good. And “good” here is meant in the traditional sense. This isn’t some off-kilter musical firebrand like Playboi Carti (another artist you’ve heard of that YoungBoy has easily outsold) or a tough-on-the-ears image rapper of the SoundCloud tradition with more personality than talent.
If anything, YoungBoy is something of a triple threat. His singing voice is pleasant, unique, with a melodic southern slur that harkens back to the country blues of artists like Slim Harpo. Yes, there’s autotune, but not the type that drenches the vocals in an effort to smooth out an unskilled singing voice. There are zero loverboy R&B concessions, no carboard cutout boasts of cars/cash/women. What you do hear is pain. Centuries of slow southern poverty, of Section 8 housing complexes reclaimed by swamps, of territorial feuds and generational grudges, of narcotics and their benefits and downsides, of disloyal women and the havoc they wreak. There’s a whole current genre of rap referred to as Pain Music, and this genre was sparked specifically by YoungBoy’s crooning. If you listen closely, you can hear Leadbelly in these songs, even the faint, disembodied echoes of Robert Johnson himself.
Which brings us to The Devil. There’s a reason YoungBoy appeals to so many white kids, from the suburbs to the trailer parks, for just as a hellhound stalked Robert Johnson’s trail, there are many such hounds of hell chasing our YoungBoy. This music is as unsettling as it is melodic. All the classic subject matter of the primal side of rock n’ roll and heavy metal is fully present here, especially within the tracks where YoungBoy lets loose his non-singing, non-pain music alter ego and simply raps. This kid can absolutely rap his ass off, no doubt. This isn’t the “lyrical miracle” type of rapping so popular with the kinds of white folk who play Wordle and search for double entendres in Kendrick lyrics. This is machine gun bursts of hyper-specific violence. YoungBoy is not concerned with bars, filling up verses with words upon words upon words until they’re top heavy, unstoppable monoliths.
To his fans, YoungBoy’s non-singing rap tracks have a whole category of their own: Murder Music. It’s a fitting title, since YoungBoy sounds like an absolute unhinged monster on many of these Murder Music tracks. Dead rivals are mocked mercilessly. Gang politics are broken down. Rap industry titans are threatened. Women and close friends betray. Guns upon guns upon guns upon guns. You see, YoungBoy is from Baton Rouge, the type of southern location where it’s fully legal to walk around the projects toting a loaded assault rifle out in the open. This is what he knows. Gangs are what he knows. Hopeless, generational urban southern poverty is what he knows. This is not party music. Nor is it of the opiated mumble rap class. It isn’t of the lean-drenched DJ Screw southern rap tradition. Nor are these songs attempting to break down oppression or aspiring to lofty lyrical accomplishments. It’s obvious that the majority of these tracks are off-the-cuff expressions of whatever YoungBoy was feeling in the studio that late night, that hour, that second, and those feelings fall squarely within the realm of extreme paranoia, PTSD from a lifetime of exposure to ultra-violence, fatalistic declarations, spiritual longing, extreme romantic strife of the baby mamma drama variety, plus that age-old, ever-lingering presence of The Devil. And all delivered with a natural earworm melodicism in the same league as someone like White Album-era Paul McCartney.
No wonder two entire generations of teenagers and counting love this shit.
by Daniel Falatko, The Metropolitan Review | Read more:
Image: NBA Young Boy, 2018/uncredited
