‘Self-Made’ MC YG Talks Police Violence, Trump and the Perils of Success
L.A. rapper YG made his name with his 2014 debut, My Krazy Life, a lucid, street-level narrative of a violent day spent in his native Compton. The album, which hit Number Two on the Billboard 200, dropped listeners headfirst into the gritty world in which the artist grew up, later went to jail for home invasion and eventually became one of his city’s hottest young MCs. With cinematic production from longtime friend DJ Mustard and his own engrossing, visceral delivery, YG quickly earned a legion of hardcore fans.
But the rapper born Keenon Daquan Ray Jackson, a member of the Tree Top Pirus, a branch of the Bloods, was hardly playing the part of street hustler. Less than a year after the release of his starmaking album, YG was shot three times by an unknown assailant at an L.A. recording studio. A single bullet pierced his hip in three places and nearly missed a major artery in his groin. In May, the 26-year-old rapper was once again in the headlines when a video shoot for “Thug,” an AD track on which he’s featured, was shot up. The rapper says that after the 2015 shooting he spent nearly all his time in the studio as well as at home with his newborn daughter, Harmony, so as to avoid the chaos. It’s the most time he has spent with his family since he first broke out with the 2009 Ty Dolla $ign-featuring ratchet anthem “Toot It and Boot It.” “I feel like that kept me sane,” he told Rolling Stone via phone on a recent afternoon. “If I didn’t have people I was going to see and who be having me stay in the house I’d be out here wild doing all types of shit. I’d be in the streets all day.”
The swirl of emotions and events comprising YG’s chaotic life is chronicled in vivid detail on his new album, Still Brazy, out now via Def Jam. The LP, which he recorded with a slew of producers – albeit not Mustard with whom he had a brief falling out over money in January – is every bit as hard-hitting as his debut. And with sonically adventurous tracks like “Bool Balm and Collected” and “Twist My Fingaz,” the rapper expands on his sound by reaching back to the G-Funk-era West Coast sound on which he was raised. “We the ones over here shaping the culture and setting the trends,” he says with supreme confidence. “This shit ain’t about to stop.”
How much did your real life change in the wake of My Krazy Life?
Oh, man, you know, ain’t really too much change with the way I was living. But more money mean more motherfuckers be around knowing I’m successful. So it’s more that motherfuckers start changing around me. That was really it.
On your new album, with the track “Gimme Got Shot,” you directly address some people around you suddenly wanting a handout.
Yeah, man. Everybody feel like I owe them something. It’s like, “I don’t even know you like that!” They all expect shit. When I go out, certain people want to come out with me so I let them come out. And then they feel like they’re owed something for being around us. It’s like, “I didn’t ask you to come and hang with me!”