First & Fifteenth is a column by the Los Angeles-based critic Paul Thompson, who reviews new and notable rap music twice a month for Audiomack World.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again — Ma’ I Got A Family (A Gangsta Grillz Special Edition Hosted by DJ Drama)

Aside from being one of the most popular recording artists on the planet, YoungBoy Never Broke Again is the perfect avatar for two parallel stories about the music industry.

The first is about the music press’ handling of artists who have been accused or convicted of acts it finds objectionable. (YoungBoy has been charged or otherwise implicated in a handful of weapons cases, including a recent federal one, but this refers specifically to surveillance footage from 2018 that appears to show him assaulting a former girlfriend.) The efficacy of curbing or muting coverage can be debated—streaming numbers would indicate YoungBoy’s runaway popularity is not particularly reliant on, like, Vogue covers—but it meets, in an unfortunate dovetail, that same press’ historic failure to adequately cover rappers whose audiences, like YoungBoy’s, skew younger, Blacker, and less coastal.

The second is about the commercialization of rap music that was previously difficult or impossible to release on legitimate platforms or track and monetize with anything resembling real accuracy. If YoungBoy’s catalog were being meted out at the same dizzying pace 15 years ago, anyone with a sense of what was happening in hip-hop would understand his popularity on an elemental level—but be unable to point to charts, contracts, or bank accounts that underlined it. Today, we see him slot in right next to Drake and Taylor Swift. But the sheer onslaught that is YoungBoy’s release schedule (he has dropped five solo LPs this year, plus a collaborative album with DaBaby), combined with the makeup of his fan base and his criminal record, mean that each new album is given a fraction of the critical attention afforded to smaller, sometimes inferior releases that scan more readily as prestige objects.

None of which is to say that YoungBoy’s catalog as a whole, or many of his tapes in the micro, are uniformly strong. But the flood of releases tracks closely with his style, which is closer to bloodletting than cold calculation. Threats of violence and moments of emotional crisis—he has grown partial to somber acoustic guitars—mingle with one another, each sounding as if it spills directly from a vein.

All of which makes the format of his latest release Ma’ I Got a Family so appropriate. While Tyler, the Creator vaulted DJ Drama’s Gangsta Grillz mixtape series back into the mainstream with last year’s CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, Family is squarely in the tradition of the series: breathless, careening, the ink barely dry. And sometimes that rush creates beautifully tragic collisions, as on “Chose,” when a verse ends with: “Please don't break our privacy / Fiend, you fiend, behind lesser things / Chosen—like they close to me / Like I am not worth anything,” Before giving way to a chorus that flaunts “Hermès everything,” as if the valueless-ness of the soul is an afterthought.

PGF Nuk — "Reel Em In"

It is grotesque to draw too much amusement from anachronistic murder punchlines, but there is something charmingly retro-minded about PGF Nuk pledging to drive down a block and “spin it like a CD,” as he does late on his new single, “Reel Em In”—and specifically, about the way he pantomimes that motion in its video.

The Chicago native does frequently feel like a bridge between microgenerations. He works in contemporary sound palettes that reflect the way the drill music of 10 years ago has bled outward not only to the satellite scenes in New York and London, but into rap from Atlanta and Florida. And yet his music retains the playfulness that comes from drill’s early roots in Chicago dance culture, the glee of codifying slang in real time, and a crypticism that mounts and mounts until it’s no longer code.

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