God Is in the Algorithm

On NBA YoungBoy, the Hidden American Superstar

NBA YoungBoy, 2018

One hundred and nine million albums sold.

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?

What if I told you it was none of the above? And what if I told you these stunning achievements were all accomplished by the time the artist was 25? And what if it was all achieved without a single legacy media feature piece, cover story, late night TV appearance or mainstream artist co-sign? What if I told you the artist was confusingly named YoungBoy Never Broke Again, a.k.a NBA YoungBoy, a.k.a YoungBoy, a.k.a YB, a.k.a Top? You’re most likely pretty befuddled right now. Chances are you’ve never even heard of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. And if you have, maybe from that younger cousin who spends his every waking moment buried in the YouTube app or your one weird friend who keeps up with niche youth culture well past the age they should be doing so. Even if you have heard of NBA YoungBoy, chances are you have absolutely no idea just how legitimately, massively popular this kid truly is.

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.

The third prong of YoungBoy’s triple threat pitchfork is the choice of beats. Here is where that southern rural blooze element really comes to the forefront. No, the instruments are not live in the traditional sense, but the rolling piano samples and muddy bottom bass evoke a palpable juke joint ambience, only ripped from the 30s and tossed into the mire of modern-day southern project yard desperation. Close your eyes and these tracks dredge up images of long scorching afternoons spent on soggy porches and stoops, grumbling food desert stomachs, fentanyl comedowns, the type of paranoia that can only come from knowing a group that lives one block away wants to kill you and your friends, and therefore you and your friends want to kill them. Good old-fashioned southern feudalism. Close your eyes harder and you can trace that thin line from the swamp blues of the 30s and 40s to the proto metal of Sabbath and Zeppelin, two other tremendous entities who were shunned and misunderstood in their time despite being massive sellers, and further still to the sticky lumpen sludge metal of Pantera, even, and beyond that to the teenage-friendly extreme fringes of Black Metal. In other words, this is music of an incredibly interesting tradition: absurdly popular but completely misunderstood, and even hated, by critics and legacy media outlets, and therefore largely unknown to anyone outside of the artist’s core demographic despite the music’s huge reach and success.

So if you’ve never heard of this artist who currently sits comfortably up there with Taylor and Drake, then this is certainly a reason.

But it’s very far from the only reason.

Your Algorithm Is Lying

Up until 2017, YoungBoy Never Broke Again existed almost exclusively on YouTube. His official channel alone has received 18 billion total views. That’s an average of 250 million views per month and 8 million per day. YoungBoy was crowned as YouTube’s top streamed artists for five years straight before getting locked up for a significant amount of time and temporarily losing that crown. Hip Hop scorekeeper DJ Akademiks estimates YoungBoy’s yearly income to be $16 million just from YouTube checks alone. Never broke again, indeed. Even audio-only vids of loose snippets and unmastered tracks, uploaded on obscure unofficial channels, receive millions of views and thousands of comments. But not only is YouTube the main source of this kid’s enormous popularity, it’s an essential key to cracking the case of the lack of coverage from the legacy mediascape.

At the time of YoungBoy’s rise, when TikTok and Kick and whatever else didn’t yet exist, YouTube was one of the only avenues for truly grassroots success for any artist. No middlemen needed. No record companies or publishing deals or agents or, importantly, media coverage. Just upload a video and watch it live or die by an algorithm not yet fully compromised by the above-named culprits. It was an algorithm our YoungBoy tapped into effortlessly, some would say even created. The YouTube algorithm of the mid-to-late 2010s was populist in nature, and YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s melodic pain music broke right through to a generation of anxious, Adderall-popping recluses with zero hopes for their futures. Hip hop party anthems just didn’t cut it anymore with this crowd. Instead, they leaned into tracks such as YoungBoy’s monster hit “Outside Today” which was basically about, well, not leaving the house. These kids didn’t leave the house either. YoungBoy was tapping right into them. It didn’t matter their skin color or class, either. From the burbs to the projects, out across the vast doomy wasteland opening up over America, YoungBoy’s catchy, fatalist anthems hit like bombs, spawning and spreading far from the watchful eye of legacy media and a hipster culture that would have embraced them just a few years prior but was now bogged down in idealism and a #StayWoke mindset. This left our budding superstar in something of a dead zone when it comes to the type of coverage that makes someone into a household name. This wasn’t always a willful ignorance either: much of the media simply hadn’t heard of NBA YoungBoy. Just as you haven’t. He had the numbers, but he didn’t have the exposure. The algorithm just wasn’t pumping NBA YoungBoy onto the screens of those who wrote for the New York Times or even Pitchfork, an outlet that would have worshipped YoungBoy just 3-5 years prior but now had their PC blinders on tight. Their algorithm was lying to them. Just as yours is lying to you.

YoungBoy’s route to superstardom would be understood today, but it simply wasn’t in 2016 and 2017. The kids understood, obviously, but the legacy media did not. Early NBA YoungBoy didn’t even think about such things. He barely even put his music on streaming platforms, just pumped out loose track after loose track and mixtape after mixtape to the YouTube wilds, tapping into that sweet, godly algorithm. Of course he has since signed to major labels, but the original, primal teenage YoungBoy music was simply splattered all over YouTube in a way that would be a detriment to most artists. But in YoungBoy’s case, it was really the only way a 16-year-old card-carrying Baton Rouge gang member could achieve exposure without diluting his essence with a management company and PR apparatus.

Even the deepest pieces on NBA YoungBoy miss this important point: NBA YoungBoy was a certifiable child star. Only this child star wasn’t being courted by Usher and Diddy. He wasn’t on Disney. He wasn’t livestreaming Fortnight. He was openly brandishing AK-47s on camera. He was openly popping pills and smoking weed on camera. He was involved in real-life drive-bys. And even though the teenage-gang-member-turned-superstar pipeline was already paved by Chief Keef just a few years prior, go ahead and take a look at Keef’s breakout video, “Don’t Like.” Do you see one gun in that video?

Nearly all of NBA YoungBoy’s early videos featured something completely incomprehensible to your average upper-middle-class American content consumer, and therefore your average legacy media watchdog: children on drugs toting guns. No matter how hard I’ve looked, I haven’t been able to find even one finger-wagging think piece on the rise of NBA YoungBoy from the time, even though his videos were custom made for finger-wagging. It’s terrifying, really. The racial implications here are dour. Had a white child toted guns and bragged about sampling heroin in a viral video, there would have been criminal charges and newspaper headlines. People would be asking where the parents are. Nobody cared that a teenager from the slums of Baton Rouge was doing it. Nobody asked where his parents were. And these videos were getting tens of millions of views. Hundreds of millions in some cases. It’s a disparity most legacy media brands won’t touch with a 10-foot pole. So they ignored the NBA YoungBoy phenomenon, most likely assuming he would be shot and killed or head to prison and would then be safe to wag their fingers at. It’s only now that he’s managed to (barely) dodge both prescribed fates for over a decade and is selling out arena tours that the media is finally reckoning with NBA YoungBoy. But they still won’t touch the main thing that made him the superstar he is today: those terrifying and massively popular early YouTube videos and the untold dozens of societal and moral issues they illuminate under the brightest of lights.

Murder Music

Especially when it comes to hip hop, legacy media outlets can deal with criminal charges. Jay-Z has multiple PR arms to bury the fact that he once was arrested for stabbing an industry executive. Lil Wayne’s multiple firearms charges are shrugged off and even celebrated. Even sex offenders get a pass if they’re rappers, like Tupac who had a sexual assault conviction or Kodak Black who gets minimal pushback on that pesky rape charge he barely escaped justice on. But for some reason, this is simply not the case for our YoungBoy. Or should we say, multiple reasons, all of which we will get to. But first the facts.

YoungBoy’s career was almost stopped dead in its tracks at the very beginning. The reason was a drive-by shooting the then-16-year-old budding superstar was involved in. The “superstar” tag is not hyperbolic, as the kid already had tens of millions of YouTube views at the time and was being courted by nearly every major label in the land. At the same time, he was also a police-database-official young gang member and was firsthand involved in real gang activity. To drill down even further, YoungBoy was the founder of the Never Broke Again (NBA) gang (which is also confusingly known as 4KT for some reason) who broke off from their original allies, the Everybody Shines Together (EST) gang after a falling out between YoungBoy and fellow teen rising rapper EST Gee Money.

The names may be comical, but the violence is not. EST Gee Money himself was gunned down outside a Baton Rogue recording studio in a still-unsolved drive-by. Multiple members of the NBA camp, including his manager Big Dump (who is the subject of one of YoungBoy’s most nakedly emotional and eviscerating tracks, “Letter To Big Dump”) and his blood cousin also lost their lives in what can only be described as a full-tilt gang war. And NBA YoungBoy himself had his hands dirty. In 2016 he was present in a car that opened fire with automatic assault rifles on a group standing outside a corner store. Life is a game of inches, and in this case it was mere inches of bullet trajectory that saved young Kentrell Gaulden, a.k.a NBA YoungBoy, from a life in the Louisiana prison system. Nobody died or was seriously injured in the incident. This lack of aim eventually blessed YoungBoy with a 10-year suspended sentence. He didn’t see one day in state prison on those charges. It’s the type of story legacy media generally loves: a talented young star from a disadvantaged background gets caught up on serious charges, beats them, repents, and heads on to glory.

But that’s not how they covered YoungBoy.

Dent Head

There are an increasing amount of wasted Zoomers who first started making music in juvenile detention. YNW Melly composed his controversial and catchy-as-hell classic “Murder On My Mind” under such circumstances, much like Drakeo The Ruler first started working out his tongue-twisting lingo while incarcerated for stealing a dollar from a South Central corner store tip jar. King Von, who plays a major role in this tale, wasn’t even thinking about being a rapper until locked up in Chicago’s Cook County Jail for years on a murder charge he eventually beat. Kentrell Gaulden is no different, penning his very first NBA YoungBoy tracks while in juvenile custody on a robbery conviction. Robbery, it seems, was quite literally in his bloodstream, entangled in his very DNA. Gaulden came from a family of “jackers,” i.e. stickup men, with his uncle being killed while perpetuating a robbery and his father in prison to this day for a jacking gone wrong. At just four years old, Kentrell suffered a broken neck while playing in his grandmother’s backroom and was forced to wear a halo brace with screws drilled into his skull, a severe device needed to stabilize his neck and avoid paralysis. Gaulden recovered, but was left with a deep-set row of indents across his forehead from the screws. When old enough to reach the school hallways, kids started calling him “Denthead” and continued doing so until he got his hands on his first gun. The detrimental psychological effects of halo braces on children have been well documented, with kids reporting feeling uncomfortable in their own skin for years or even decades afterwards. Some report feeling disembodied, becoming used to the halo brace keeping their bones together and fearing “falling apart” once removed. Many, like in Gaulden’s case, report bullying from peers due to both the brace’s extreme appearance and the scarring left behind once removed. Later in life, YoungBoy would release a track called “DentHead” and although the lyrics don’t specifically address the scars across his forehead or any related psychologic trauma, the title was a clear effort to flip the tables on his childhood torturers and reframe trauma as a source of potency.

Raised by his grandmother, with his mother in and out of the picture, Gaulden never stood a hint of a chance at a normal life on the straight and narrow, even more so after grandma died and left this child essentially homeless. Had he not picked up the pen while serving that juvie bid, chances are young Gaulden would have graduated on to the prison system with his father or ended up head tapped and dying on a street somewhere on the north side of Baton Rouge. But this is what the legacy media loves, right? A ghetto kid made good? Overcoming physical adversity? This type of thing makes for a terrific redemption tale that brings in many clicks.

Just not in this case.

Dropping Bags On Opps

The crimes, both on paper and off, of NBA YoungBoy are incomprehensible and unforgiveable to your average coastal-city content consumer. There is, for example, the urban myth that YoungBoy is directly responsible for the deaths of at least 19 individuals. A larger number than Charles Manson. And just like Uncle Charlie, what these rumors imply is that YoungBoy didn’t actually physically murder them. His followers did. His henchmen. His gang. And these murders all took place during and even after his rise to superstardom. Never mind that YB has never been questioned, arrested, or, at least from what I can find, even been investigated for these alleged hits. But you wouldn’t know this if you were one of the three million people who checked out the three-hour-plus Trap Lore Ross documentary on the subject, suffering through TRL’s stuttering arguments and gathered “evidence,” most of which amounts to random Reddit posts on the death of EST Gee Money all the way to the killing of none other than King Von himself, which was ultimately ruled self-defense. Although there is no known concrete evidence YoungBoy really did call these hits, it doesn’t help that a similar hidden superstar and another key player in this saga, Lil Durk, fresh off his first Grammy win, was picked up by the feds for orchestrating and paying for the murder of YoungBoy’s artist’s cousin in a case we will also be discussing very shortly. Because of Lil Durk, the concept of the mega-rich mainstream superstar rapper paying for hits on rivals is a very believable thing, indeed. It is rumors like these from which myths are made, and in YoungBoy’s case it cannot be argued that these rumors are fuel for his continued success.

Fans comb the lyrics for clues, posting possible finds on the surging, 60,000-member NBA YoungBoy Reddit sub. Just as kids in the 70s revered Led Zeppelin for the rumors of groupie sacrifices and black magic dealings, YoungBoy fanatics revel in his rumored “shot caller” status and it only serves to amplify his stardom and growing legend. But it’s also one of the main things that keeps the legacy media away from NBA YoungBoy even as his exposure grows. They already got burned by Lil Durk, heavily covering him receiving the keys to a Chicago suburb and meeting with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot in a failed attempt to rehab his image just before the feds swooped in. Therefore, nobody seems to be chasing that big first mainstream media NBA YoungBoy redemption arc interview, at least not when there’s even the remote possibility he’ll be picked up on murder-for-hire charges just days or weeks after it drops.

Beat Tha Feds

If it’s redemption that would bring someone like NBA YoungBoy the mainstream media showcases that have eluded him, then he’s ducked that particular trope at nearly every turn. No humanizing interviews on the therapist couch ala Chief Keef. No peans to PTSD ala YG. No Stop the Violence campaigns or appearances at billionaire Hamptons charity bashes. Although he’s certainly mellowed out a tiny bit, no longer that livewire teen that could die or go to jail at any minute, he’s never backed off the gang violence. Even when he became a Columbia Records artist, one of his video shoots was raided and a cache of weapons, all wielded by convicted felons, was discovered. This set into motion a cross-country tour of the legal system as YoungBoy was eventually accused of violating his probation, went on the run, was finally picked up in Los Angeles after a chase (he wasn’t going quietly), was shuffled to a jail in Louisiana where he grew a crazy mustache much-discussed online, then was back to LA where he was, astonishingly, found innocent of the gun found in his vehicle during the chase. Check out the cheering crowds of teenagers outside the courthouse if you really want to get a sense of the NBA YoungBoy cult following in action.

There were no interviews after walking free on that case, no promises to straighten up his act and leave the shenanigans behind. If anything, YoungBoy emerged from those legal entanglements more defiant than ever, boasting in song after song about beating the feds at their own game, pumping out that murder music and jumping into even higher profile gang feuds leading to even higher profile crimes. If the press demanded a redemption arc in order to start covering this young phenomenon, then they certainly weren’t getting it anytime soon.

The Many Children of NBA YoungBoy

It wasn’t widely known in the early 60s that Brian Jones, guitarist and then leader of the Rolling Stones, had fathered at least three illegitimate children by the time he reached his 21^st birthday, well on his way to at least eight in his short lifespan. This didn’t cause much of a stir at the time since publicity machines closely controlled the media, and the Stones’ machine was a force to be reckoned with even in that early stage of their run.

This was the beginning of what Bret Easton Ellis has called the cultural age of Empire, an era spanning some 40 years where, as long as you were an accepted star, you could pretty much do no wrong. This Empire had, of course, long crumbled by the time YoungBoy came into the world’s consciousness. Post 2016, a 20-year-old artist with up to 13 children was something beyond what any responsible legacy media outlet could just shrug off. And then there was the never-ending drama surrounding the mothers of his children. The most famous mother, Yaya Mayweather, daughter of boxer Floyd, at one point was arrested for stabbing another of the mothers in a fit of jealousy. Floyd Mayweather has never, from what I can find, commented once on his daughter’s entanglement with this controversial rapper or her arrest for extreme violence. Could it be that the financial issues we’re just finding out about in 2026, where Floyd is close to bankruptcy, play a part here? NBA YoungBoy is certainly vastly more solvent than Mayweather, and having a baby with a big-time wealthy rapper looks, on paper at least, like the right move.

It is this type of dysfunctional fatherhood that the legacy media, those bastions of morality, just cannot get past when deciding to grant NBA YoungBoy serious coverage or not. It is irresponsible, at the least, and even criminal, at the worst. Keep in mind many of these writers and critics don’t even have a single child, let alone 10 by eight different women. And while other rappers who do get mainstream coverage also have multiple illegitimate children, they manage to keep this out of the spotlight since, you know, their baby mammas don’t tend to stab each other and make the news.

But like all things in this story, it goes even deeper than that. It’s more than just an outward disgust at an alleged “irresponsible father.” It’s a tough thing to put your finger on, so I will just leave it to a single Reddit commenter in the YoungBoy sub, from a comment with 161 upvotes and counting: “White people fear that YoungBoy and Keef are breeding a rich black class that’ll one day take over.” Like all things Reddit, this may be a tad hyperbolic but it cuts deep. “The more, the better” is the second most upvoted comment in the thread, and it may have some semblance of a point. Because NBA YoungBoy is no doubt unfathomably wealthy at this stage in his life. Given his current net worth of $70 million, plus a massive song catalog most likely worth in the hundreds of millions and counting, and given the fact that he is known to acknowledge all children DNA-bound to him, each one of those 13 kids and counting is technically, financially at least, set for life. So are his grandchildren, and potentially their children as well. Is it a traditional fatherhood? No, but then again what is a traditional fatherhood in the year 2026? No matter the finger-wagging mainstream media types may send in YoungBoy’s direction, the fact remains that those kids are wealthier than they themselves will ever be. It’s a tough fact to wrestle with, so mostly they decide to just leave those NBA YoungBoy pieces on the shelf.

Shootout at the Trump Corral

The NBA YoungBoy story is so wild, so truly surreal, so very modern, it’s fully inevitable that Donald J. Trump would somehow make an appearance. DJT actually rears his head twice, once indirectly and once in a very direct fashion that will forever confuse and cloud YoungBoy’s reputation with any and all mainstream media outlets. First the indirect: in 2019 YoungBoy was leaving the Trump International Beach Resort Miami on his way to his appearance as headliner at that year’s Rolling Loud Festival. His entourage was fired upon by unknown assailants in broad daylight from a stolen Cadillac Escalade. One of the mothers of YoungBoy’s children was hit in the attack. YoungBoy’s entourage blasted back, missing the Escalade but killing an innocent bystander on a bicycle, Mohamad Jradi. A five-year-old girl was also grazed in the shootout. In one of his many so-called “heroic” moments, defined by his legion at least, YoungBoy assisted the mother and helped her to the ambulance before ducking the scene and making it to the festival, performing his set on time as planned to a wildly appreciative crowd. Much like Bruce Springsteen, YoungBoy has a reputation for never letting his fans down, not even letting a shootout stop him from taking that stage. All very idealistic until you consider an innocent man died that day, and a child almost did as well, and even though YoungBoy paid for the man’s funeral and has since expressed great regret over the incident, it turned out to be the first amount of truly widespread media attention he received. Not ideal. Legacy media outlets tend to let gang warfare slide for rappers in cases where said warfare is contained to a single city, or better-yet a specific neighborhood. This is how gang-related rappers from Chief Keef to G Herbo to even Snoop have managed to duck press judgements. The gang banging they were once involved in was contained to specific hoods and almost entirely consisted of the deaths of gang members only. They don’t like it when this very same violence spreads its wings and starts moving outside its designated territory.

A good example is the case of Chicago Gangster Disciple rapper FBG Duck, who in 2020 was gunned down in front of a Dolce & Gabbana store in Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, an expensive neighborhood known for its luxury shopping. Had Duck been gunned down on the South Side, there wouldn’t have been one tenth of the press coverage and associated outrage this case garnered. It most likely wouldn’t have even been solved. But since it happened in the Magnificient Mile, the FBI got involved and brought six members of the Black Disciples, the gang repped by Lil Durk and King Von, to justice. Both Durk and Von were mentioned in the indictment, and you could safely say this was the beginning of the end for Lil Durk, who was then selling out stadiums across the country while receiving keys to cities and meeting with bug-eyed mayors. Footage began circulating of a few of Duck’s killers sitting on Durk’s private plane and appearing in his videos. It would be less than a year before Durk was arrested by the same FBI in a case we will get to soon, and it’s clearly stated in the paperwork that the feds first started looking into him as direct result of his alleged involvement in the FBG Duck ambush, which they would not have been looking into in the first place had it not gone down on the Magnificent Mile.

Much like the FBG Duck murder, the shootout at the Trump International Beach Resort Miami was something the press just couldn’t get behind or shrug off. Even though he wasn’t the perpetrator, and even though nobody was ever charged in the shooting and YoungBoy’s camp was cleared on self-defense, this was clearly a spillover from the Baton Rogue gang war, only now it was wreaking havoc far from home in ritzy downtown Miami. Just another stone in the growing wall separating NBA YoungBoy from mainstream acknowledgement.

The Real NBA Connection

With a name like NBA YoungBoy, you best believe the real NBA, the National Basketball Association, would play a significant role in this story. Look no further than flashy, acrobatic Memphis Grizzlies star Ja Morant, a noted YoungBoy disciple who insists YoungBoy music be piped in over the sound system during Grizzlies practice, before games, during timeouts and halftimes. It was NBA YoungBoy he was dancing to in a strip club in Colorado the night before a game against the Nuggets, and on that night Ja just couldn’t help whipping out a pistol and waving it around the club while being filmed for Instagram live. A lengthy suspension from the league followed, along with a wave of bad press for YoungBoy, who wasn’t in the club that night and had nothing to do with it.

Nor did YoungBoy have anything to do with the incident just months later where Ja was once again listening to NBA YoungBoy, this time in a car, once again being filmed for Instagram live, and once again couldn’t help pulling out a pistol, this time gaining an even lengthier suspension. A look at Reddit comments on the NBA sub from the time uncovers gems such as “YoungBoy really leading Ja astray” and “Ja discovering YoungBoy was the beginning of his downfall.” Meanwhile, no evidence exists that NBA YoungBoy has ever met Ja Morant in his life, or even knows who Ja Morant is, or even follows basketball. Ever the perceived villain, now NBA YoungBoy’s music itself was being blamed for the falloff of an NBA superstar.

Morant, however, stayed true to his YoungBoy fandom even after coming back from suspension. He was spotted dancing in the crowd on opening night of YoungBoy’s 2025 tour, thankfully this time without a pistol in plain sight.

The Trump Pardon

Now for the main reason why NBA YoungBoy isn’t that famous: in May of 2025, he was pardoned on those pesky federal gun charges stemming from the video shoot raid. The pardon came from the president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. No this is not a joke. Go ahead and look it up. So why have you most likely never heard about this? It’s not like it wasn’t covered. Like all things Donald, it was splashed over every outlet from the Associated Press to all the major papers and out across the socials. The hip hop mediascape, in particular, went bonkers over this one. The issue with this news, and why your algorithm most likely didn’t send it your way despite the widespread coverage, is twofold. As I have already discussed in depth, NBA YoungBoy may be one of the top-selling rappers of all time and one of the top-selling artists in any genre of the modern era, but he isn’t a household name. Even if you did scroll past it in May of 2025, it was most likely overshadowed by whatever other horrors were taking place that day. You didn’t even see it. And if you did, it was “NBA who?” You probably thought it was some NBA player you’ve never heard of, caught up in a gambling ring. But simple lack of recognition isn’t the only reason the story never grew legs, fading from sight after just one round of headlines, yet another casualty of the fast-moving 24-hour news cycle.

Donald J. Trump pardoning NBA YoungBoy just doesn’t fit the prescribed narrative. Our YoungBoy is, after all, a young Black gang-affiliated rapper with a criminal record longer than one of his beloved Newport 100s the Times is obsessed with. NBA YoungBoy has fathered 10-or-more illegitimate children and regularly threatens many different arms of law enforcement. This should, if we’re going by the pre-set Trump stereotype, be someone Donald Trump detests. Trump should want this kid in prison. Trump should want him deported back to whichever country his great great grandma was born in. But instead Trump … pardons him? On automatic weapons charges, toted by a convicted felon, while on parole, during a gang-related video shoot.

This just doesn’t fit the narrative, does it?

Like with many major news stories in these strange times, hip hop media seemed to get it much more intuitively than the traditional press outlets, whose coverage ranged from dry factual reporting to sheer confusion to outright hostility of the “MAGA rapper NBA YoungBoy” variety. But hip hop vloggers got it right away. Bradford Cohen, YoungBoy’s lead lawyer, was not only a contestant on The Apprentice in 2004 but has maintained a close relationship with Trump over the ensuing decades, repping Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski on battery charges in 2016 and providing analysis on the president’s multiple lawsuits including advice on appeals and settlements. This close relationship has helped gain pardons for two other of Cohen’s high profile rapper clients, Lil Wayne and Kodak Black. This makes Cohen’s substantial legal fees a terrific investment for any rapper facing federal charges, such as NBA YoungBoy who was at the time sitting in a Utah jail awaiting sentencing on minor prescription fraud charges, and also facing down what could be decades in prison on that cache of weapons recovered at the ill-fated video shoot. For just a fraction of his current net worth he could wipe that federal slate clean, cop out to those minor Utah charges, walk free and mount 2025’s top-selling arena tour. And that’s just what he did. Just like other more well known, but less successful, rappers such as Lil Wayne and Kodak Black did before him. YoungBoy may have some problems, but he certainly isn’t dumb. He knows a good deal when he sees one, and splurging for Mr. Cohen was an opportunity to get out of jail, expand his fame, expand his riches. Optics be damned.

While the hip hop universe may not care too much about those optics, the white world most certainly does, namely the legacy media. The thought of Donald Trump “helping out” a young Black man “railroaded by the justice system” is enough to short circuit the brain of your average political columnist or serious cultural critic. It just does not compute. So how do you cover such a thing? With a simple, straight forward news story. No opinions. No hot takes. Just report it and watch it get buried in the algorithm right along with all the other “news” that doesn’t fit your narrative. And this goes for both sides. Charlie Kirk was alive at the time this pardon took place. He never seemed to mention it. Not in a post, not in a speech, nowhere. Joe Rogan never appeared mention it, either. A sweep of right-wing media brings up almost nothing. A few low follower X commenters saying things like “How can DJT be racist when he pardons YoungBoy!” or, conversely, “Kid Rock/NBA YoungBoy stadium tour when?” Which goes a long way toward illustrating the confusion and lack of understanding suffered by both sides on this issue.

Was Donald Trump pardoning a criminal rapper a major news story? Yes. But was it treated like one? Absolutely not. It was given bare bones coverage and quickly swept off on the tide of the never-ending news cycle atrocity exhibition. And all because it didn’t fit either side’s narrative.

The NBA YoungBoy erasure continues.

The Domestic Violence Problem

The divide between hip hop media and traditional legacy outlets is best illustrated when looking at the subject of domestic violence. In the traditional media, one lone accusation of anything close to domestic violence will pretty much end you. Right then and there. You’d be better off killing someone than laying a single finger on your partner while at your home or in a hotel room or, God forbid, out in public on camera. The hip hop media has a more nuanced take on the issue overall. It’s a “shit happens” type of philosophy that points to a major gap between well-off coastal-dwelling adults and those who grew up in poverty and unstable households.

Look no further than the Diddy case. Traditional media outlets were incensed over the infamous “Diddy beating Cassie in the hotel hallway” video, whereas a sweep of hip hop media’s Diddy coverage shows a much deeper focus on Diddy potentially being bisexual. This isn’t to say the hip hop media made light of the beating or condoned it, and many, many figures in Black entertainment expressed disgust and dismay, but the sheer, unmitigated fury coming from the mainstream media was very much watered down on the other end of the aisle. About the beating, you see people like Charleston White stating, “Sometimes you’re doing drugs with a woman and she starts freaking out in the hallway and you gotta get her back inside before the cops come.” I am of the opinion that, if it wasn’t for all the sexual assaults, if Diddy’s only scandal here was the videotape, Diddy would have been shunned forever by traditional media outlets but still would have had a shot at a career and continued coverage in hip hop media, much like in the case of Chris Brown, who is headlining stadiums and scoring top features right to this very day even though he once beat up one of America’s true sweethearts, Rihanna.

But when it comes to domestic violence in hotel hallways, on camera, Diddy has competition in NBA YoungBoy. I’ve watched the footage, and even though YB was decades younger than Diddy at the time of the assault, a mere 18, there’s really just no way to excuse his actions. And unlike the Diddy video, which was suppressed for many years, this one dropped immediately after it happened and certainly tainted his reputation in the legacy media at a crucial time, when he was just beginning to explode onto the national stage. The incident in question occurred in Ware County, GA, at a hotel while YoungBoy was in town for a show. It involved yet another one of the mothers of his children, who at the start of the clip is standing in an open doorway in the hotel corridor. She is shoved backwards by someone inside the room, falling to the hallway floor. YoungBoy exits the room. He’s wearing a tracksuit and a large pair of headphones with the wire dangling. The mother, Jania, jumps to her feet, and for several long seconds it appears YoungBoy is attempting to coax her back into the room. It appears the violence may be over. But Jania resists, and YoungBoy grabs her wrists and tries to pull her back into the room. Her shirt comes off at one point, and she falls one more time before YoungBoy finally manages to get her back into the room and slams the door.

If I were on night shift security at that hotel and witnessed this scene on the monitor bank, I would think it was a kidnapping. I would think the young woman was being held in that hotel room against her will. The local cops thought so too, piling on charges like kidnapping that could have kept YoungBoy in jail for years. Jania was uncooperative, telling police the two were “just playing around.” In the end the charge was dropped to a misdemeanor and YoungBoy walked free yet again.

Looking back at YoungBoy’s grassroots rise, this seems to be the point where this young budding superstar rapper lost any chance he may have had at Jay-Z-style praise from the the mainstream, non-hip hop media, where he (rightfully, in this case) became a pariah, or at least someone on which to cast suspicion. This is where much of the coverage stops, dwindling down to simple news blurbs about arrests or RIAA accomplishments for years, until 2025, when they could ignore the phenomenon no longer.

The Death of a King

You may not have heard of the Black Disciples and the Gangster Disciples of Chicago. But they are incredibly important in another key aspect of NBA YoungBoy’s erasure in the mediascape. And this one comes from within the hip hop industry itself. You see, for many years, from 2020 right on up to today, NBA YoungBoy was blackballed in the industry, and the only way he survived was his massive legion of loyal fans. Other blackballed artists, who unfortunately didn’t have their own significant fan armies on the ground, have faded into obscurity under these same circumstances. But how did one of the top-selling rap artists of all time end up getting blackballed within the very same industry he lords over?

It all started on the night of November 6^th, in that strange pandemic year of 2020. The city was Atlanta, one of the few places where nightlife continued unchecked in the urban-themed clubs and hookah lounges of Black Hollywood. On that night King Von, already a superstar whose song “Crazy Story” was pumping out of football stadiums, was playing a record release show to a packed club audience. Born into the Black Disciples, Von as a teenager had been right on the frontlines of a Chicago teen gang war and was rumored to be responsible for up to seven murders, including being listed as the prime suspect in the killing of infamous teen girl gang assassin Jakira Barnes, a.k.a K.I. Von had been locked up for a murder and floundered in the Cook County Jail four years before seeing trial, where he was found innocent by the jury. It helped that one of the witnesses had been killed in the interim.

When he took up the mic, Von was in an excellent position: he was a member of the BDs, after all, who featured prime time, industry-accepted rappers such as Lil Durk and Cheef Keef. Durk took him under his wing, and within months of his release King Von was one of the rising stars in the rap game, appearing on The Breakfast Club (where he hilariously almost admitted to the murder he had just been acquitted of), landing mixtapes on the Billboard charts, and scoring a word-of-mouth hit single in “Crazy Story” that sparked TikTok teen dance trends despite being about robbing a drug dealer from Tennessee. There can be no doubt that Von’s connections in the BD’s, and the BD’s deep connections to the upper reaches of the rap industry, paved the way for a success that had many making comparisons between Von and Tupac.

Meanwhile, on the GD side of the equation, any type of traditional rap industry success was seemingly out of reach. Only one GD rapper, the ultra-charismatic FBG Duck, managed to ink a label deal, and Duck was assassinated just weeks after signing that deal, shot in broad daylight in a rich neighborhood by a team of BD assassins. The GDs just couldn’t win, and the word on the proverbial street in the hip hop media landscape was that the GDs were officially blackballed from music industry success.

On paper, King Von and NBA YoungBoy should have gotten along just fine. Both shot callers from feared street gangs. Both popular rappers. Both with the type of street cred one must earn through many years of jail cells and other hardships. And at first this seemed to be the case. There is even a rumored, but never surfaced, collab track featuring the two. Von’s mentor Lil Durk was initially a fan of YoungBoy as well, shouting him out in interviews and naming him as one of his 50 favorite rappers of all time. Durk was also a big fan of YoungBoy’s protégé Quando Rondo, an emaciated young rapper from Savannah who took YoungBoy’s bluesier, more emotional elements and spun them into something close to ghetto spirituals. Durk did appear on a track with Quando, and Quando was even seen in a video backstage at a Von concert, where Von urged an obliging Quando to diss the GDs.

But back to that ill-fated YoungBoy/King Von collab. Allegedly there is one, but also allegedly YoungBoy was reluctant to release it. Von made noise about this online, which led to YoungBoy allegedly sending some suggestive DMs to Von’s girlfriend and rapper in her own right, Asian Doll, which led to Von releasing photos of himself holding hands with the aforementioned Jania, one of the mothers of YoungBoy’s children.

The beef was fully on. November 6^th, 2020, was a cold night in Atlanta and Von was on edge. With two hits of ecstasy in his system, he was ushered from the club after his show to a rented vehicle with a crew of BDs at his side, one of whom would later be indicted in the FBG Duck murder, plus a carload of hired security riding in a separate vehicle. The plan was to head back to the Airbnb, but along the way those plans changed. Word got to Von that none other than Quando Rondo was enjoying a night out at the nearby, now infamous Monaco Hookah Lounge. After sitting in the parking lot for a long time outside the lounge, Von finally spotted Quando standing outside his own rented vehicle. Von approached, followed closely by a dozen armed BD members, and sucker-punched Quando savagely and beat him down to the ground as the BDs closed in. Then out from the truck popped a Quando associate, Lul Tim, armed with a pistol. With five shots, he fatally wounded King Von. The BDs shot back, hitting Tim in the hip. One steped in to stand over him and raised his gun, but it jammed. In came multiple undercover cops, shooting and killing the BD standing over the extremely lucky Lul Tim, and hitting another in the head as the BDs fled. In the aftermath, King Von died at the hospital during surgery, rocking the rap world to its core, and Lul Tim, an instant legend, was arrested at the same hospital while in treatment but eventually saw the charges dismissed.

The reaction from the rap industry and fans was straightforward: Quando and Lul Tim were in the wrong. They brought guns to a fist fight. Never mind that the BDs had guns too and could clearly be seen closing in on Quando, who very well could have died had his friend Tim not stepped in. The rap industry loved King Von. He was seen as something of a Tupac figure, slim and muscular and handsome, charismatic yet lethal. The perfect formula for rap success. Quando Rondo and Lul Tim were instant villains in the BD-saturated rap industry. Death threats poured in on social media and from the very mouths of rap industry insiders. A lot of those threats trickled up the ladder to NBA YoungBoy himself. Never mind that he was in jail at the time. All that mattered was that Quando and his friend Lul Tim were YoungBoy associates, and Von and YoungBoy had been trading disses for months leading up to the shootout. Suddenly white kids were typing things like “YoungBoy’s days are numbered them BDs gonna get em” and “Long Live Von” and “Slide 4 Von” on Reddit, and YoungBoy’s descent to rap industry super villain was more or less set in stone.

It is a testament to YoungBoy’s organic popularity that he’s managed to stay on top of the rap game despite losing the support of a wide swath of the mainstream rap industry for a significant period of time over this incident. This meant no Drake-style feature would be forthcoming. No Lil Baby or 21 Savage or Young Thug treatment either. All the major players in the industry stood firmly behind Lil Durk. He excluded from important playlists and coverage on the major rap media showcases. It also meant further isolation from the legacy media, who tend to take their cues from what is being covered at the top of hip hop media. It didn’t help that Quando clapped back with a track called “End Of Story,” an obvious reference to Von’s hit “Crazy Story” where he boasted about the shooting, or that he bailed out Lul Tim and suddenly Tim was draped in NBA/4KT related jewelry, or that in one of the first tracks YoungBoy dropped after his jail release he rapped “You don’t wanna see Lul Tim hop out that truck.” All across the rap social media landscape, they were counting down the days until Durk and the BDs were going to “slide for Von.”

It didn’t quite work out that way.

The Gas Station Shootings

On the very first show Quando Rondo played after Von’s death, all the way out in Waycross, GA, he performed to a nearly empty audience. People were simply scared to go to a Quando Rondo show, knowing that the BDs were gunning for him and for anything YoungBoy-related. Sure enough, at a gas station just outside Waycross after the show, a gunman opened fire on Quando’s crew from across the street. One person rumored — but not confirmed — to be Lul Tim himself was shot in the hand. Rap fans and industry insiders cheered this, as if the shooting was a sporting event. The BDs were indeed sliding for Von. No arrests have yet been made in the shooting, although video exists of Quando and his crew relaxing at the gas station, talking to some smitten young female customers just minutes before the shots rang out.

But the gas station mayhem didn’t stop there.

Fast forward to another gas station in 2022, this one right next to the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, about as high profile a gas station as you’re going to get, where Quando and his cousin Lil Pab were stopping for some fuel. Quando was in town for a few recording sessions and podcast appearances, and his cousin was along for a nice weekend in the LA sunshine. Being the rap star of the two, Quando remained in the car while the unfortunate Pab pumped the gas. Three gunmen, mistaking Pab for Quando, shot him down right there at the pumps in broad daylight. Footage of the shooting aftermath was available within minutes, and this footage is where I, the author of this piece, finally broke through the fourth wall.

I’ve been trying to write about all of this objectively, with that cold, hard eye of reason, but seeing that poor kid, who was seemingly uninvolved in all this drama, lie dead on the ground on the national news as Quando Rondo screams the most pained sound of anguish I’ve ever heard, brings tears to my eyes. It causes me to back off this story for a few days. It’s easy to view this stuff with an eye for entertainment value … gang member rappers doing gang member rapper things … but this footage really underscores how silly all this is. Countless deaths of countless young men, many of them incredibly talented, over nothing more than an unreleased rap song.

Not that Lil Pab or Quando Rondo or YoungBoy received any sympathy. Far from it. A scan of the social media chatter following the shooting reveals taunts, “Long Live Von, pick ya’ boy up Quando” and “YoungBoy next” and “Screamin like a bitch.” In a song dropped not too long after the shooting, “War About It,” Lil Durk does a Quando Rondo screaming impression, probably one of the worst, most heartless things I’ve ever heard on any song, ever. In a DJ Akademiks interview after the shooting, Durk says, when asked about the incident, “We different in Chicago … Ain’t nobody sayin ‘slide for Von’ no more … must be something in the water … none of the people you talkin’ about (he had been asked about Pab and Quando) matter.”

It comes as absolutely no surprise, then, that Mr. Durk Banks, a.k.a Lil Durk, was picked up by the feds on murder for hire charges for the LA gas station shooting. Durk may be a rap star, but he sure isn’t smart, committing the horrendous error of orchestrating a murder far from any ghetto, right next to one of the biggest tourist attractions in Los Angeles. Of course the feds were going to come down hard on this one. It’s tough to have any sympathy for Durk here. After watching that shooting footage, it’s safe to say I hope he dies in a cold federal penitentiary. And if the prosecutors have their way, he surely will.

But that’s just me. Going by industry sentiment, everyone wants to “Free Durk,” as the t-shirts boldly demand across the nation. One “Free Durk” tee was even spotted recently in footage from IShowSpeed’s appearance in Ghana. Even now that the true villains have been revealed, those being Lil Durk, the BDs, and even the industry titans still riding for them, still everyone hates YoungBoy, just as YoungBoy himself illustrates in his savage, punk-as-all-hell “I Hate YoungBoy” track, one of his single greatest Murder Music anthems. Even after Durk’s arrest, artists from Drake to 21 Savage still refuse to jump on a YoungBoy track, even though doing so would be a guaranteed million-plus more in their bank accounts.

The blame for YoungBoy’s erasure isn’t just with the legacy media. He’s shunned and discriminated against in the rap industry as well, standing alone, as the New Yorker put it, with nothing but hundreds of millions of fans to keep him afloat.

Grave Digger Mountain

Every good villain needs to live on a mountain, and in 2020 NBA YoungBoy relocated from the humid treachery of his home city to the cool, crisp wilds of Utah. You heard that right, urban America’s leading figure dropped out and moved to the land of elk and Mormons —to a sprawling, modern mansion with sweeping mountain views and very high security. The estate is nicknamed “Grave Digger Mountain” in YoungBoy lore. Time after time while researching this story, YoungBoy shows us he isn’t dumb. Had he not moved to Utah, had he stayed in LA or Louisiana, chances are he’d be shot down at a gas station, and chances are those guns would have come out at the command of Lil Durk. But the BDs couldn’t reach YoungBoy in Utah. Nor could the hip hop media snoops that had been stalking him since the age of 17. One of the most impressive things about YoungBoy is the mystery he cultivates. For someone so insanely popular online, he goes through long phases where he deactivates all social media accounts. Even when he’s on the internet, he appears uncomfortable, often high, never making eye contact, his movements jerky.

We may have just stumbled upon yet another reason NBA YoungBoy is hidden in plain sight: he doesn’t seem excited to be on camera. In the very few interviews he’s given, he’s cagey at best, incommunicado at worst. Every time a clip posts, multiple commenters tend to point out how very … well … gay he seems. Now, I personally don’t think that YoungBoy is bisexual, but I have to admit that some of the social media clips of YoungBoy sashaying around his space-age kitchen rocking eyeliner and painted-on designer jeans might not be helping solidify that opinion. The open homophobia that still runs wild in the hip hop sphere might explain why YoungBoy is so reluctant to sit down with Charlamagne for that first Breakfast Club interview, even knowing they would be friendly to him. Why bother when all he’ll get is threats from BD-associated rappers and homophobic comments in the chat?

The hip hop media game is something he just doesn’t play, or is perhaps incapable of playing. On Instagram he often appears sullen, haunted, restless, stalking around his lush Utah hideaway like he has no idea what to do with himself. This is someone who very obviously isn’t comfortable in his own skin, and no amount of millions can ever cure such a thing.

Due to living in Utah, and the fact that his myriad legal entanglements prevented him from doing a proper tour until late 2025, this superstar of popular music has remained an enigma. He isn’t spotted out and about in LA or New York or Atlanta. He isn’t at awards shows. He isn’t cracking a Kardashian. He never shows up courtside at NBA games, not even at the home of the Utah Jazz. The only times we saw YoungBoy were clips of him cooling in his isolated mansion, or rare photos of him out and about in his Utah neighborhood on four wheelers. In one hilarious fan photo, he has apparently randomly showed up at a local kid’s 19^th birthday party. There are rumors YoungBoy is interested in the Mormon church and often invites missionaries in to talk to him. An elderly neighbor, interviewed by a local news station after the Trump pardon, remarked how YoungBoy was always polite and helpful. The reporter appeared visibly disappointed to hear this.

Like all things YoungBoy, the move to “Grave Digger Mountain” has simultaneously increased his intrigue but also further kept him from the mass fame he should enjoy. But it’s also kept him alive, so we’ll chalk this one up as a successful tactical move for YB.

The Comeback

As of late 2025, against seemingly insurmountable odds, NBA YoungBoy found himself the last man standing. Let’s take a look at the carnage the still-young star could look down upon from his perch on Grave Digger Mountain in the aftermath of the Trump pardon.

Lil Durk: Imprisoned waiting trial on serious charges. Likely to die in prison

King Von: Deceased

Young Thug: Bogged down in legal issues, overweight, his popularity slipping

21 Savage: Not as popular as he once was

Lil Baby: Nowhere near as popular as he once was

Playboi Carti: Also losing popularity

Drake: Reeling after the Kendrick beef, aura gone

And yet YoungBoy, somehow, some way, was free and clear. Charges wiped off the map by the president of the United States of America. And he was still doing numbers. First order of business: an arena tour from coast to coast. We’re talking basketball arenas. We’re talking where the Lakers play. We’re talking 20,000 seaters. We’re talking multiple nights at said arenas. We’re talking shows that sold out in mere minutes. On September 27^th, YoungBoy played a sold out show at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Two nights later, another sold out show at Prudential Center in Newark. As a matter of fact, every show sold out on this tour, all 42 of them. The Make America Slime Again tour (“slime” is gang slang, don’t ask). The tour grossed $70 million, not even including merch, selling an astonishing 500,000 tickets. The vast majority of the crowds came from America’s most disadvantaged populations. But they made it through the doors, by hustle or any means necessary, dressing in YoungBoy signature green bandannas and buying up merch by the armful, screaming every lyric, every adlib, right back at the superstar as he stalked the stage like a feral lion, being handed blunts and (yes, New York Times) Newport 100s by his many handlers like a marathoner passed cups of water from the sidelines.

Not that there weren’t a few hiccups along the way. This is, after all, NBA YoungBoy we’re discussing here. The show at Chicago’s Prudential Center, where the Bulls play, was cancelled by Chicago PD due to threats from the Black Disciples. Same with the show in Atlanta, the city where King Von met his fate. Then you have the usual concert tour shenanigans like mass brawls in the parking lots. Yet no matter how hard the press tried to drill down on these few catches in the fabric, in the end they just couldn’t ignore the stunning success of the MASA Tour. They grudgingly had to cover it. Now he was right in their faces, threatening even Taylor Swift in the useless popularity contest that is American pop culture. Hence the New York Times finally sending that reporter. It took them long enough, and it remains to be seen if this coverage will continue, but for now YoungBoy seems to finally be standing on the precipice of household recognition.

And yes, Lul Tim was dancing front and center on stage for every show of the tour.

In 2026, YoungBoy Never Broke again could easily sell out Madison Square Garden night after night like Billy Joel. If he was the Super Bowl halftime act, mainstream America would be confused and angry, but I bet you the players would be psyched, and I bet you the ratings, just from YoungBoy fans alone, could beat Bad Bunny’s. And the legacy media is just now, after 10 years of ignorance, beginning to wake up and smell that coffee. Still, we haven’t seen any high exposure deep dives like this one. Could it be that the average upper-middle-class reporter or critic just doesn’t —or simply can’t —understand? This is that rare phenomenon that is beyond their level of comprehension. So they sit and wait silently for that fall off … be it death or prison or, even better, fading popularity. But it’s the mainstream media itself that is dying. And there’s no greater sign of this than their inability to grasp NBA YoungBoy, who is quite possibly the most truly modern artist currently operating. The kid is still only 26. If he manages to dodge his many pre-subscribed fates, as he has continued to do thus far, he’ll be thriving well after the legacy media outlets that have ignored have long dried up and died.

Final Note

I took this essay very seriously, even going so far as to use some of my old music industry contacts to reach out to YoungBoy’s team for a quote. Not that I expected him to respond, after all what is The Metropolitan Review to someone like NBA YoungBoy? What is any publication, big or small, to NBA YoungBoy? Nothing. Less than nothing. He doesn’t need us in any way. But I did make sure to point out that I’ve been very fair and respectful to him over the course of the piece. Just as I suspected, YoungBoy hasn’t provided a comment, but a certain lower-level member of his team has. The person doesn’t wish to be named, but did say I could quote them:

“Thank you for reaching out. YB is hardly ever asked. Sorry we don’t have a quote for you, but the fairness you mention is appreciated. It’s onward and upward for us. YoungBoy taking over worldwide 2026. Print that.”

Daniel Falatko is a New York-based author. His latest novel, The Wayback Machine, is out now.