In 2022, solely Taylor Swift and Drake streamed greater than YoungBoy By no means Broke Once more. However even together with his huge reputation and wildly prolific output (he launched eight full-lengths final yr), the rapper hasn’t revealed a lot about his private life.
Now, in a candid, prolonged Billboard cowl story written by Meaghan Garvey, the 23-year-old rapper opens up about his new life in snowy Utah, the place he at the moment resides below home arrest. And whereas a safety workforce limits his guests to a few pre-approved folks at a time, YoungBoy has been entertaining some sudden company: Mormon missionaries.
The Louisiana rapper turned them away the primary time they swung by his house in late 2022. However after they returned, he determined to them in: “I wished assist very badly. I wanted a pal. And it hit me,” he recollects.
“It was simply cool to see somebody with a distinct mindset that had nothing to do with enterprise or cash — simply these fantastic souls,” he tells Billboard. The missionaries now focus on The Ebook of Mormon with YoungBoy recurrently, which accounts for his latest “Hello Haters” video opening with a quote from the Latter Day Saints tome. In accordance with YoungBoy, their visits assist him “be sure that my coronary heart is in the best area”; he’s planning on being formally baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ the Latter-day Saints after his ankle monitor is eliminated.
“Even when my detrimental ideas come again, after I do need to inform them, ‘Not at the moment,’ I simply don’t let nothing cease it,” he explains. The rapper’s potential baptism dovetails together with his rising uncertainty over the violent storytelling in his personal lyrics. This yr’s I Relaxation My Case (launched on Motown, his first since signing with the label) deliberately featured fewer mentions of weapons than on earlier tasks.
Whereas he’s conscious that lyrical shifts might have an effect on his reputation — “What in the event that they don’t like me now?” he mused about his viewers in the course of the interview – he refuses to rap about violence merely to fulfill listeners. “I’m not altering. I cannot be provoked, I cannot be damaged, and I’m not going again to who I was. Settle for it or not — I ain’t going again.”
Learn YoungBoy’s full Billboard cowl story profile right here.
