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NBA Youngboy

Hip-hop has been shifting from one pole to the other in recent years. On the one hand,

there are the harmonic sensualist post-Drake and Drake, who blended R&B and pop songwriting

and passion into hip-hop to make it a global power. On the other hand, the rowdy musical style

thespians have recently renamed the genre psychedelia, punk, or both. Drake's new reign atop the

Rolling Stone Artists 500 list came to an end this week, with Youngboy Never Broke Again

racking up 180.3 million streams from September 11th to the 17th (Spinelli Mark 10). The rapper

is a streaming favorite and a regular in the RS 500's Top 10, and his rise from sixth to first last

week was aided by the release of his latest album, Top. The album debuted at No. 1 on the

Billboard 200 Albums chart, with 129.1 million song streams helping it sell 122,800 album-

equivalent units (Spinelli Mark 14). Besides, two songs from the album, "My Window" and

"Drug Addiction," made the Top 15 of the Billboard Top 100 Songs list, with the former

debuting at Number 10 with 11.3 million streams and the latter debuting at Number 15 with 10.1

million views.

 YoungBoy Never Broke Again spends the majority of his latest album, Top attempting

to justify the word. In every album, he flexes on his detractors, keeps up with Lil Wayne and
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Snoop Dogg, and flashes his pistols. While it is officially his second studio album, the term

"second" is a bit misleading. It's the latest in a long line of hits for the controversial 20-year-old

from Baton Rouge, who has already topped the YouTube charts with two remixes this year

(Music 20). But it's not NBA YoungBoy's success, success, or scandals that set him apart as a

rapper. He's mastered the art of blending the holy and profane in rap, alternating between

calculated provocation and codeine-laced anguish from song to song or even within the same

song. Given the record's concept, the majority of Top's 21 songs fall into the former category,

making "To My Lowest" remarkably undefended moments among the rest of the set and its

weakest.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again, a song by the outstanding young Baton Rouge, La.

rapper YoungBoy, has a unique touch to it in this atmosphere. He is a scientific realist, calm and

uncomplicated. It is an approach that hasn't been common since the late 1980s and early 1990s,

when Tupac Shakur, Kool G Rap, Scarface, and others ruled the roost. However, considering

hip-growing hop's pliability, its reflective, extreme, streetwise arm may make a comeback. The

intensity in YoungBoy's eyes is evident in Never Broke Again. "It is either prison or death, like,

literally," he said in a recent discussion with Mass Appeal about the brutality in Baton Rouge and

its terrible magnetic field. There is no living there.” YoungBoy Never Broke Again gets his

energy from his music (Music 23). He is just 17, but he is already among the most talented

young Southern musicians in recent years, an intuitive songwriter who tempers his bravado with

inner severity. His most recent mixtape, "AI YoungBoy," was released this month and is his best

yet. It comes just three months after he was released from jail after a guilty plea to felony assault

with a weapon, allowing him to avoid charges of premeditated manslaughter.

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There is a vicious unruliness at the heart of "AI YoungBoy," much like on his

breakthrough mixtape, "38 Kid." YoungBoy Never Broke Again has a way of gliding and

bouncing atop depressing keyboard-based output. His calm demeanor is striking; it sounds like

he's speaking from a place of confidence rather than doubt (Music 23). He accomplishes a lot

with only a few words: "In the Began drawing alone, I don't need nobody," he emphasizes one of

the highlights, "Came From," shrugging rather than bragging (Oesterle 34). The brawniest song

here, "Left Hand Right Hand," always glitter with keen detail: "I'm washing the residue off of

my nails."

NBA young boy uses expressionism in his work; he expresses his feeling and experience.

In today's world of chart-topping hip-hop, a passionate breakup song like "To My Lowest" is

rare. YoungBoy switches from a dejected drawl to emotional yelps in the chorus in only four

bars, which is easily his most emotional on the record. Since fathering two kids from separate

mothers earlier this year, he sings to a former lover, but it's uncertain which one. When he puts

the guns down, emotional instances like this make the audience want to cheer for YoungBoy;

they're the lines his fans would applaud as "easy to relate" and "deep" across the media. In the

first verse, he raps, "I been fallin' out, ain't crying loud, no one to console me." “If you don't love

me, suffer from something; if you thug me, I say, 'Fuck you.' Even though I'm really not feeling

right.” NBA YoungBoy has no qualms about admitting that he has flaws, as long as they are the

same flaws that the rest of us have.

But YoungBoy's shortcomings are more extreme, and when he has the chance to confront

them on "To My Lowest," he refuses. His narcissistic outbursts are well-known, particularly

when it comes to the women in his life; at the end of last year, he accepted a plea bargain that

resulted in a felony assault and criminal charges against him dismissed, resulting from an
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altercation with a now-ex-girlfriend. In the first verse, he raps, "Shit, I think that's because you're

frightened of me." In the second, he made a plea in the foreground, "I ain't gon' hit you," as he

describes a battle with the girl he's discussing. It's unsettling because the listener has every

reason to doubt YoungBoy. By the end of the record, his influenza performance is terrifying.

But the thing about striving to be human is that we strive to improve. His network has

expanded throughout three initiatives, but he hasn't. He said it right after those lines, "But I'm

still being me," and it's mirrored in his lament on "To My Lowest" nearly a year later: "I ain't

never stop, just keep on flowin'." NBA (National Basketball Association) On Top, YoungBoy

does not bring something new to the table, but he does deliver some solid crooning (Barbone 12).

He's still trying the bare-knuckle emotional realism he was capable of last year, but it's beginning

to sound empty.

There is plenty of chest-puffing on this record, but not every song hits these notes.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again is loud and obnoxious when he's in this personality mode,

speaking in terse bursts. However, his contribution to almost immeasurably gloomy development

is consistent through all of his approaches. The song "Sounding Like It" combines gloom and

melancholy. Dreary keys appear on “Rich as Hell,” “Time I'm On,” and other songs in the

record, setting the example of meditative isolation. It's also presented on "Lonely Child," which

starts with a stoic, depressed spoken intro: "They wouldn't expect me to have felt the way I came

into the game, the picture that I had put out." I realize it doesn't seem that way. That's why they

talk about me as though I'm not human when we're all human."
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Work Cited

Barbone, Jordan. The Effects of Participant-Selected Background Music on Executive Function

Task Performance. Diss. West Chester University, 2019.

Music, Nielsen. "Year-End Music Report." (2017).

Oesterle, Ulf. "What They Post, Where They Post, and When They Post It: A Content Analysis

of Social Media Use of the Top 50 Artists in 2018." (2019).

Spinelli, Larissa, and Mark Crovella. "How YouTube Leads Privacy-Seeking Users Away from

Reliable Information." Adjunct Publication of the 28th ACM Conference on User

Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. 2020.