Young Boy Never Broke Again Get
How YoungBoy Never Broke Again Hit No. 1 From Jail: Fans Had His Back
The 21-yr-erstwhile rapper, currently awaiting trial on gun charges, has tallied billions of streams and simply scored his fourth chart-topping album despite having little mainstream profile.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again, 1 of the most popular rappers in the country, is past some measures nonetheless obscure: At 21, he has almost no mainstream profile, his songs receive barely any radio play and he has never performed on television.
In and out of jail since he was a teenager, YoungBoy, or YB to his most defended fans, is also currently incarcerated in his abode state of Louisiana, pending trial on charges that he possessed a gun every bit a felon. Federal prosecutors take called him "a danger to the community."
However YoungBoy's new album, "Sincerely, Kentrell" — for his real proper name, Kentrell D. Gaulden — just became the rapper'south fourth release in less than two years to hitting No. 1 on the Billboard chart. In betwixt, he reached the Top 10 with two additional mixtapes, an undeniable run that has solidified him as a poster child for a new kind of streaming-era stardom even equally he remains an industry outsider and exception.
Overall, YoungBoy'south violently brooding music has been streamed more than six billion times since last September, including over one billion video streams, but received only 55,000 radio airplay spins in the aforementioned period, according to MRC Data, Billboard's tracking arm. On YouTube, where he has nearly 10 million subscribers and has uploaded almost 100 music videos since 2016, he frequently outpaces artists similar Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift.
Narrowly edging out the fourth-week sales of "Certified Lover Boy," by the chart juggernaut Drake, "Sincerely, Kentrell" ended its first week with 137,000 in total units. That debut also bested the rollout earlier this month of the much-hyped showtime album past Lil Nas X, who has been widely recognized for his marketing genius. And dissimilar his chart competitors, YoungBoy included no guest features on his album in a moment where buzzy collaborators are thought to be a cheat code to streams for would-exist blockbusters.
"I oasis't actually seen something like this in hip-hop," said Lanre Gaba, the executive vice president of Blackness music at Atlantic Records, YoungBoy's label, comparing his die-difficult supporters to those of the M-pop group BTS. "He hasn't always been the artist that some of the gatekeepers have let into these other spaces. That makes his fan base even more than rabid."
Using that passion and the artist's unavailability equally a rallying point, YoungBoy'southward team tapped into his deep reserves of audio and video material while communing directly with his listeners to shape the new anthology and its release strategy.
Label executives maintained collaborative grouping chats with the rapper's obsessive fan pages on social media to stoke and magnify their existing grass-roots marketing efforts. And YoungBoy's musical brain trust relied on those same loyalists to help select the track list.
In some cases, they fifty-fifty used fan-generated titles from what are known in the rap world as snippets — partial, unofficial versions of unreleased songs that may have been played in passing on Instagram and are and so lusted after for months, or years, by listeners.
YoungBoy — widely known equally NBA YoungBoy, his name before copyright concerns became an result — besides participated heavily in the planning, keeping up with his squad in marathon daily calls from jail, each routinely interrupted by the 15-minute time limit.
"YB makes music for YB," said his go-to audio engineer Jason Goldberg, known as Cheese. "Only when you take into account what the fans want and information technology correlates, it'due south this huge explosion. Everybody's been involved. Then nosotros didn't permit them downwards."
Cheese said "Sincerely, Kentrell" was formed from some 150 possible songs recorded in hotel rooms, on moving tour buses and in studios across the country before YoungBoy was arrested in March.
On one rail, "Life Support," the engineer said, "you lot can hear some of the road underneath a few of those lines." For others, he ran l-foot cables out of a 2d-story window and so YoungBoy could rap in the front seat of a parked Range Rover, because smoking was prohibited inside his Airbnb.
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The entirely freestyled songs, filled with trauma, threats and regrets, are taken from the roiling life of someone struggling to change — a combustible mix of street politics, ceaseless personal tragedy and sudden riches. Raised by his grandmother in n Baton Rouge, La., YoungBoy dropped out of school in ninth grade and started rapping at 14 on a microphone from Walmart.
But even as his music took off online, leading to a $two million deal with Atlantic in 2016, he struggled with serious legal bug.
In 2017, facing two counts of attempted offset-degree murder for his office in a nonfatal drive-by shooting, YoungBoy pleaded guilty to a lesser accuse of aggravated assault with a firearm and received a suspended x-year prison sentence, plus probation.
Subsequently boosted arrests, including one for domestic violence in 2018, and another shootout in which the rapper'due south coiffure was found to be acting in self-defence, YoungBoy was ordered to spend 90 days in jail and serve the residual of his probation on firm arrest. (He later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery for slamming downward and scuffling with a girlfriend in the 2018 incident.)
"You accept a pick to make," a judge told him at the fourth dimension. "Y'all can either exist Kentrell or NBA."
The rapper replied, "I experience the same manner. I can't be both."
Most recently, in March, YoungBoy was taken into custody by federal agents in Los Angeles after a loftier-speed chase for charges stemming from an arrest in Billy Rouge concluding September, in which the rapper was amid xvi people accused of possessing guns and drugs at a video shoot.
Lawyers for YoungBoy have argued that he was unfairly targeted — pointing to the regime' proper name for the operation, Never Free Again, "an obvious accept off on Gaulden's highly successful music and marketing brand" — and are seeking to suppress evidence they say was unconstitutionally obtained. They chosen the F.B.I.'s pursuit of the rapper in Los Angeles a "massive and wildly unnecessary militaristic brandish of forcefulness and intimidation."
YoungBoy's real-life contour has at once created commercial hurdles for his career and heightened his outlaw aura, drawing comparisons to Tupac Shakur, Gucci Mane and Lil Wayne.
"They suspension the rules, they do it their own way and the people pick that," said Alex Junnier, a manager for YoungBoy. "In that location'due south nil anyone can do to cease it."
Nonetheless, there has been wariness from corporate partners like Spotify, Apple tree and even YouTube, where YoungBoy nonetheless dominates. "His image would finish me from getting anything for him — it was blocking ads, anything we wanted to exercise," Veronica Lainey, the rapper'southward product managing director at Atlantic, said. "His streak of getting No. 1s, that's really helped change the narrative."
But the years of volatility too required the characterization to be nimble with its handling of an iconoclastic artist and his precarious career.
"He is never going to exist told categorically what and when and where something should happen," said Shadeh Smith, YoungBoy'south video commissioner at Atlantic, recalling the days when she would wake up to a new video the rapper uploaded online himself. "Now I'm lucky most of the time I go a heads up that something's coming, only that wasn't always the instance."
With YoungBoy away for the rollout of "Sincerely, Kentrell," the characterization had to once again tap into its flexibility and inventiveness, seeking to "accept the online conversation to the streets," Lainey said.
Atlantic put up billboards with the slogan "YB Better," a line the rapper's fans utilize to spam comment sections beyond the cyberspace, and used the N.C.A.A.'south new proper name, paradigm and likeness rules to turn higher athletes into influencers by paying them to mail service about YoungBoy's music. (The prevalence of YoungBoy memes on TikTok grew organically, they said.)
When the chart race with Drake for No. i turned into a nail-biter, the YoungBoy squad and its faithful went into overdrive.
To garner additional interest and activeness, the label added two bonus tracks to the album midweek, including i, "Still Waiting," that YoungBoy had recorded over the phone with Cheese from jail. And the fans did their function, urging i another to listen to "Sincerely, Kentrell" on loop, with some participating in group streaming parties to boost the numbers.
"They picked him, so they're not going to let him down," Junnier, the rapper's manager, said. "Someone similar him wasn't supposed to be here."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/arts/music/nba-youngboy-never-broke-again-sincerely-kentrell.html
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