Jeff Weiss

First Interview Reveals NBA Youngboy’s Early Raw Edge

For the relaunch of POW, we're running my lost long-form profile of NBA Youngboy – a story that I began reporting a decade ago. This is how it came together: In 2016, I returned to Baton Rouge for the first time since Boosie was acquitted of murder charges four years earlier. His homecoming concert was the nominal purpose for my visit, but by then, Bad Azz’s popularity had somewhat dimmed. Kevin Gates was the reigning king of the city, and the next generation of stars were already bubbling up from the north and Southside. The most promising was NBA YoungBoy, a 16-year-old, whose lone hit,“38 Baby,” referenced both the revolver and the street on which he was raised. About a week before I arrived, YoungBoy had signed with Atlantic, but the news wasn’t public yet. One afternoon, I wound up spending a few hours with him. He was precocious, volatile, and heavily armed. To my knowledge, it was his first real interview. About two weeks after I left the Louisiana capitol, YoungBoy allegedly fired a gun several times during a drive-by shooting. In late November of that same year, U.S. marshals arrested him before a concert in Austin. Facing two counts of attempted first-degree murder, he eventually pled guilty to a reduced charge of aggravated assault with a firearm. He spent the next six months in parish prison, and for fairly obvious reasons, I opted not to publish the story. In early 2018, a major music magazine sent me back to Baton Rouge to profile YoungBoy again. The idea was that I’d combine my previous reporting from 2016 with individual portraits of the contemporary heroes of Baton Rouge. The goal was to capture what made this small, otherwise unremarkable city one of the capitals of modern American rap. YoungBoy—who was already one of the most popular artists on YouTube—was meant to be the centerpiece. A week after I left Baton Rouge, YoungBoy was detained once more. This time, there was a Georgia warrant seeking Kentrell Gaulden on charges of assault, weapons violations, and kidnapping. In the intervening years, there have been about a half-a-dozen additional arrests, significant jail time, and a presidential pardon. But the emotional rawness, pain, and plutonium energy of his rusted scalpel wail deservedly made him one of the most significant voices of his generation. As for the story, when I turned in my draft several months later, it was about twice as long as anything the magazine had ever published. Understandably, there were differing visions about the best way to present it. Refusing to compromise the final product, I opted to let the feature languish in my hard drive for seven years. With the relaunch of POW, it seemed only right to set it off with the YoungBoy portion of the feature—with subsequent chapters to follow. After all, most songs and stories should be uncensored. https://t.co/K17fWFr5Q8