The last song NBA YoungBoy performed every night on his MASA Tour — short for Make America Slime Again — is “Lonely Child,” from his outstanding and bracing 2019 album “AI YoungBoy 2.” It’s one of the most chilling rap songs in recent memory, a woozily elegiac number about being forced into the darker corners of your soul as a means of self-protection.
“The image that I had put out, they wouldn’t expect me to have feelings,” he raps in a cloistered mumble. “Know it probably don’t seem like it / That’s why they talk about me like I ain’t human / But we all is.”
Every night, 18,000 or so fans who’ve spent the prior 90 minutes in a state of exultant and rowdy rapture shout along to the end of the chorus: “Take this pain away! This pain away!” They yell the angsty refrain like a victory chant; onstage, YoungBoy looks triumphant, and gratified and also a bit spent.
That is perhaps as knowable as NBA YoungBoy — his full artist name is YoungBoy Never Broke Again, YB for short — will allow himself to be. He is the most vital and polarizing young presence in hip-hop, with a few dozen releases full of exquisitely pained music drenched in severity and anxiety. This tough beauty has made him a template for what success in the genre may look like moving forward. He’s neither hero nor villain, or even an antihero, but a potent channeler of communal angst — a wild, sagacious and bruised hybrid very much in the mode of 2Pac.
That approach has made YoungBoy — despite plenty of self-inflicted obstacles — the defining rap star of the last few years. In terms of raw data, his figures are astonishing. Since he started releasing music in 2015, he has earned well over 100 platinum and gold certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America, which puts him in league with artists like Taylor Swift. More than 30 of his videos have over 100 million views on YouTube, the primary engine of his success. The MASA Tour is on track to gross $70 million, making it one of the most lucrative rap tours ever.
For his primary fan base, heavily young and Black, the 26-year-old YoungBoy (born Kentrell Gaulden) is the alpha figure of contemporary music. But to much of the rest of the world, his success remains largely invisible, proof of how some of the most meaningful performers working today aren’t mass mainstream figures, but rather mass cult.
This is why YoungBoy’s recent sold-out arena shows, packed as they were, still felt like private communions. Three of those performances across the last six weeks — in Brooklyn, at Barclays Center; in New Orleans, at Smoothie King Center; and in San Antonio, at Frost Bank Center — teemed with fervid fans mostly outfitted in black and the rapper’s signature slime green, with a level of palpable and roaring exultation that verged on a World Cup final.
What they were cheering was YoungBoy’s version of an Eras Tour — though in his case, not a capstone of years of increasingly popular and lucrative road shows, but an explosion of bottled-up demand for an artist with a decade of hits and virtually no track record of performing them. Until now, largely because of legal troubles, YoungBoy has had almost no opportunity to meet his admirers face to face. (He’s been in and out of legal peril since the mid-2010s, most recently pleading guilty to federal weapons charges. In May, he was pardoned by President Trump.)
This tour, which recently ended after more than 40 shows, was his first outing of any true scale. He played a crowded set, sometimes as many as 50 songs in under two hours. The stage was simple — a large shack that cracked open like an egg. A gnarled, leafless tree and power lines loomed off to the side. At the beginning of the show, he descended from the ceiling in a wooden coffin. The mood was eerie and empty.
As a performer, YoungBoy is unseasoned but passionate, wavering between mischief and apathy. At times, he meandered around, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. Some songs featured a retinue of female dancers, but YoungBoy rarely paid them much mind. He showed far more animation when his male friends came out to rap alongside him, a symphony of boyish rowdiness.
Despite YoungBoy’s demeanor, the crowd never wavered; almost everyone stood on their seats for the duration of the performance, as if hoping their howls would be heard over everyone else’s. There was a sense of mutual curiosity between the stage and the fans. Occasionally, YoungBoy simply puffed on a blunt and took in the spectacle. Every now and then, he cracked something that might be termed a smile.
YOUNGBOY TURNED 26 in New Orleans, and spent some the earliest moments of his birthday walking around Bourbon Street. In footage of the scene, he looked eerily calm as the outing turned from a stroll to a scramble. For a figure who’s been largely shielded from the lived experience of fame, he appeared to be joyfully toying with it, smirking as he was pulled to safety by police.
The following night, the New Orleans arena was crammed and a little testy — this was a birthday show, and also essentially a hometown gig. (YoungBoy is from Baton Rouge, 90 minutes away.) At some point, security closed off access to the venue after ticketless fans rushed the doors.
The local rap legends Juvenile and Birdman spent time in the V.I.P. section at the foot of stage right; the hip-hop personality DJ Akademiks and the livestreamers Adin Ross and Cuffem mingled with the local jazz legend Trombone Shorty; the EDM star Zhu and a sprinkling of provocatively dressed fans made it through, too, including a woman with slime-green masks painted over her nipples, and no shirt obscuring that fact.
Backstage before the performance, a few dozen local friends and hangers-on loitered, but YoungBoy was on his tour bus, avoiding the mingling. He moves with wariness and discretion, a preternaturally quiet person perpetually in observation mode.
He travels in a convoy from city to city — at least four tour buses, one for him alone, one for his wife and some of his children who accompany him, one for friends and recording. A few days after New Orleans, he was heading from Houston to San Antonio, helping the rapper Mellow Rackz record a song, giving her quiet approval line by line while absently watching “The Terminal List,” a drama about Navy SEALs on Amazon, and scrolling through Instagram reels of animals, prison fights and Master P performances before landing on one about himself, and quickly closing the app.
He kept a few things in close reach: an order of Raising Cane’s chicken tenders, which he picked at; a stacked double Styrofoam cup, from which he sipped regularly; a pack of Newports that he frequently pulled from, sparking them with a lighter attached to an extravagantly heavy chain dangling from his frightfully tight jeans. His sunglasses never came off, even when he dozed off to the hum of the highway.
It is an astoundingly insular way to navigate the world. While YoungBoy’s music creates an intense bond with his fans, and reveals an uncommon degree of emotional sophistication and psychological wisdom, he appears reluctant to deploy that capacity for connection in other settings. He has a vivid internal strength and determination, but seems on the verge of fragility. Charismatic, savvy, evocative, gentle but urgent — he’s 2Pac for an anxious generation.
SINCE THE LATE 1980S, hip-hop has wrestled with how assiduously to court the outside world. Through increasing collaboration with R&B, and later pop, it expanded its sonic horizons, eventually becoming the most popular music in the country, and the world. Over time, others began to borrow from hip-hop just as confidently as hip-hop had borrowed before. Country, K-pop, reggaeton — they all took the templates of rap music, and also the act of rapping, and found homes for them within their walls.
That’s meant that hip-hop is in more places than it ever has been, but also that its mainstream core has been slightly weakened. What’s resulted is a flourishing of local scenes, and artists like YoungBoy who do not rely on the systems of distribution and promotion — like radio — that hip-hop has so effectively taken over. He is a creature of the internet, which means he is a maestro of intense one-on-one emotional connection. His fandom is in no way passive.
The day YoungBoy performed in San Antonio, Billboard reported that for the first time in 35 years, no rap song appeared in the Top 40 of the Hot 100. But while that news spawned much discourse about hip-hop’s purported fading relevance, it more reflected how that chart doesn’t properly account for the ways contemporary rap fame works. The hundreds of thousands of fans who showed up for this tour did not appear aware of the alleged crisis.
Generationally, YoungBoy is an inheritor of several micro-waves of emotionally anxious rap music, whether it’s the broken-down playboy antics of Drake or the desperate moans of the SoundCloud generation that included Lil Peep, XXXTentacion and, later, Juice WRLD. He’s a frisky rapper, very much in the lineage of pugnacious Baton Rouge eccentrics like Boosie Badazz and Kevin Gates.
YoungBoy’s closest contemporary analogues are also colossally popular artists with devoted cult followings who just barely limn the pop mainstream: the bluesy melancholist Rod Wave and the rage-rap vampire Playboi Carti. Each has succeeded not by reaching out to unlikely collaborators who can expand their reach, but by doubling down on their own idiosyncrasies and feverishly attracting new fans to a steady and singular vision.
This fragmented environment is a real shift from the 2000s and 2010s, when the most famous rap stars were those offering the biggest tents — the effortless hybridity of Drake, or the ruthless sonic ambition of Kanye West. Those artists argued for rap music’s potential by expanding the definition of the genre so broadly that it made room for the curious and even the skeptics.
By those frameworks, YoungBoy is virtually a relic — he has cultivated an audience that feels overlooked or misunderstood by the mainstream, and he makes music that won’t, or can’t, cross over. His songs don’t nod to the present, or rely on sonic innovation. He thrives by maintaining a direct line of impassioned communication, amplified by how he has navigated the legal obstacle course that has shaped his career. In 2016, he was charged with attempted murder, and later pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. In 2018, he was charged with assault; in 2020, he was arrested on weapon and drug charges.
From late 2021 through early 2025, he was on house arrest, living on a Utah compound and awaiting the resolution of his various cases (and also facing new drug charges), while recording and releasing music. That changed in May, when he was pardoned and announced this tour.
Back on the bus before the San Antonio show, YoungBoy said he wanted to rest, so some of the junior members on tour took the chance to record, including Lul Tim, who in 2020 shot and killed the rapper King Von, who had been attacking his friend, the rapper Quando Rondo.
Lul Tim was part of the coterie of intimates who provided a buffer for YoungBoy onstage. He was often there during “I Hate YoungBoy,” which played over the speakers at the end of some of the nights. It’s a rowdy diss track against the Chicago rapper Lil Durk, a close ally of King Von.
Unlike “Lonely Child,” which asks the crowd to salve a wound, “I Hate YoungBoy” is a cheer for mayhem, an opportunity to litigate private quarrels in public spaces. It’s the sort of song you play when you’ve survived untold battles, and are feeling just a little bit mischievous and punchy. Often, after a few hours of work, it was the most free YoungBoy appeared all night.
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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