The City of Lit for ID Magazine
written by CASSIDY GEORGE
photography ILYA LIPKIN
styling GEORGIA PENDLEBURY
It’s 2:06 a.m. on Rue Jean-Mermoz in Paris’s 8th arrondissement. With even the “open late” bars and restaurants now closed, the only thing on the desolate road is an eerie black Sprinter van with tinted windows and a smoking exhaust pipe. Reclined in the back seat is Kentrell DeSean Gaulden, one of the most popular, influential, and controversial rappers in America. Through its windows, I cannot see the Louisiana native, who is known by many names—YoungBoy Never Broke Again, NBA YoungBoy, YoungBoy, and YB—but he can very much see me. Running on just three hours of sleep, I’ve been told by his team to stand near the van. I feel as though I’m on trial while Gaulden scans me and determines, seemingly in slow motion, whether or not I am someone worth speaking to.
It’s 2:06 a.m. on Rue Jean-Mermoz in Paris’s 8th arrondissement. With even the “open late” bars and restaurants now closed, the only thing on the desolate road is an eerie black Sprinter van with tinted windows and a smoking exhaust pipe. Reclined in the back seat is Kentrell DeSean Gaulden, one of the most popular, influential, and controversial rappers in America. Through its windows, I cannot see the Louisiana native, who is known by many names—YoungBoy Never Broke Again, NBA YoungBoy, YoungBoy, and YB—but he can very much see me. Running on just three hours of sleep, I’ve been told by his team to stand near the van. I feel as though I’m on trial while Gaulden scans me and determines, seemingly in slow motion, whether or not I am someone worth speaking to.
For years, Gaulden has occupied one of the strangest positions in the contemporary music landscape. The rapper’s 775 YouTube videos have amassed a total of 19 billion views. For years, he was the most popular artist on the platform, ahead of both Drake and Taylor Swift. With over 35 feature-length projects already to his name, his relentless work ethic has earned him a rabid fan base and a youth culture influence so immense that hip-hop commentators have referred to him as “this generation’s Michael Jackson.” Still, he is far from a mainstream celebrity. Gaulden is currently the rapper with the most RIAA-certified Gold songs in history and the youngest artist to achieve 100 entries in the Billboard Hot 100, but he’s never had a No. 1 hit. Most people either consider him one of the most important musicians alive today, or have never even heard his name. For NBA YoungBoy, a rapper of extremes, there is no middle ground.
An ideal star for the content-ravenous Twitch generation, Gaulden’s remarkably consistent professional release rate is matched by his wild and unpredictable personal life. At just 26 years old, he has fathered 13 children with 10 different women, and he’s been arrested at least eight times in the last decade for everything from attempted murder to kidnapping and drug fraud. He has been to both jail and federal prison, and spent the years between 2021 and 2024 on house arrest in Utah, before being pardoned by President Trump. His criminal history is the subject of countless fan-made documentaries. (Some are up to 6 hours long.)
Like his many fans on the internet, I have spent an inordinate amount of time wondering, “WHAT WILL NBA YOUNGBOY DO NEXT!!??” The conditions of our interview have changed countless times in the last 36 hours: An initial plan to go to Disneyland was scaled back to go-karting, but that also fell through as Gaulden was MIA at call time. I spent the day in Paris under my own version of house arrest, anxiously awaiting updates as to whether, where, and when we would find time to speak before I had to leave for the airport at 5 a.m. We eventually resolved to meet for late-night steak frites near the Champs-Élysées; that plan also went awry when I arrived and discovered the venue functions as a club after the dinner rush.
Waiting outside the van on Rue Jean-Mermoz, the air is thick with uncertainty. I realise the members of Gaulden’s team are even more on edge than I am. Eventually, one of them musters up the courage to knock on the window and utter the magic words: “YB, this is Cassidy. She’s from New Orleans.” The tension immediately dissipates. Gaulden lurches out of the van in designer skinny jeans and a fur-collared jacket, like a spider in slow motion. In an impossibly soft and gentle voice, with his eyes still on the ground, he asks me meekly: “You really from Louisiana?” When I confirm that I grew up just 80 miles from his hometown, Baton Rouge, he finally looks up and flashes a warm smile: “Knowing that makes me feel so comfortable.”
As an artist, NBA YoungBoy is just as shaped by Louisiana’s music history as he is by the state’s racist carceral culture. (Louisiana has the second-highest incarceration rate in the US, and though Black people make up 33 percent of the state’s general population, they constitute nearly 70 percent of its incarcerated members.) Extending the lineage of a buoyant, swampy hip-hop sound embodied by Kevin Gates, Boosie Badazz, Juvenile, and Birdman, Gaulden has taken Fee Banks as his longtime manager—a local legend who helped Lil Wayne start his Young Money label. Louisiana is well-known for its jubilant party music, but Gaulden’s imprint is unique in its melancholic, haunting quality. Both fans and the rapper himself describe his work as “pain music.” His discography sounds like a series of unedited diary entries. Some tracks are remarkably vulnerable, others are incredibly violent.
Although he started writing songs at just 7 years old, Gaulden’s breakthrough project came a decade later with a mixtape called 38 Baby: a play on words referencing his home block—3800 Chippewa Street—and a type of firearm. The namesake track’s music video features teenage Gaulden with his peers in “BR,” flexing and dancing with guns. Now with over 119 million views, the viral video has achieved icon status rivalling “I Don’t Like” by Chief Keef, who’s maybe his closest contemporary in terms of his outsider status in the industry, despite his gargantuan, almost godlike status in American youth culture. In 2025, the New York Times’s Jon Caramanica compared Gaulden to another legend, writing: “[YoungBoy] is neither hero nor villain, or even antihero, but a potential channeler of communal angst—a wild, sagacious and bruised hybrid very much in the mode of 2Pac.”
Noticeably baffled by the synchronicity of two Louisianans meeting in the country responsible for the founding of our home state (and for shaping much of its culture), Gaulden cordially invites me back into the Sprinter with him. The van’s floor is covered with at least a dozen untouched takeaway boxes from what appeared to be multiple gourmet Parisian restaurants. With the smell of lobster, sea bass, and filet thick in the air, we finally speak.
CASSIDY GEORGE: You’ve been spending more time in Europe recently. Do you enjoy Paris because it feels somewhat familiar to you?
NBA YOUNGBOY: I like it because it’s far from home. I think I make more [music] here because my mind is more at peace. It helps me talk about more, I guess.
You are the most prolific rapper in the industry right now. But do you ever have days when you have nothing to say—when you just stare at a blank page?
We go through something every day. That’s how I look at it. I feel like I wear everything on my sleeve, and I never have a dull moment. I’m always thinking about something, whether it’s past, present, or in the future. You should never live a day and not have something to say about it.
What does freedom mean to you nowadays?
Being away from drama.
“I just want to make people
NBA YOUNGBOY
happy, and if I can’t do
that, then I just want to
stay out of the way.”
Is that why you recently deleted your Instagram?
I feel like I was doing a bad job of managing myself. I think that certain situations and certain people turned me into a bad person, a person that I don’t even like myself. It doesn’t feel right or good to know that you are always hurting somebody. I think I became a very bad person, and it’s taken a big toll. It feels very lonely, actually.
Do you believe you “allowed” this to happen, or that it was a natural consequence of your environment?
I think in life, you always have a choice.
What is the ongoing source of your relentless work ethic? Do you ever just want to tap out or quit entirely?
I want to quit right now, actually. But all of this… It’s way bigger than me. I just want to make people happy, and if I can’t do that, then I just want to stay out of the way. I feel like my W will be shown through my kids, you know? It’s not about money or any of my own achievements. If you were to meet them right now and say to me, “I think you did a great job,” that’s the win. That’s the motivation that keeps me going. I just want my kids to be happy and willing to do whatever it is they choose to do in life.
Are you happy? And still willing to do what you have chosen in life?
I think I’m happy. But what makes you happy?
Suddenly, Gaulden’s phone starts ringing. “That’s my Daddy,” he says. He puts the call on speaker and repeatedly hits the number one.
HELLO, THIS IS A FREE CALL.
1 1 1
AN INCARCERATED INDIVIDUAL AT ALLEN CORRECTIONAL FACILITY IN LOUISIANA—
1 1 1 1 1
THIS CALL IS NOT PRIVATE.
IT WILL BE RECORDED AND MAY BE MONITORED.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1
THANK
1
YOU
1
FOR USING
1 1
SECURUS
1111111
“Hi, son,” I hear as the line finally connects. Gaulden was just 8 years old when his father was sentenced to 55 years in prison for a robbery gone wrong. I immediately grab my jacket and start to creep out of the van, attempting not to squish any steak tartare beneath my boots along the way. Gaulden reaches his arm out in front of me, as if to hold me back. “You can stay,” he says, leaving the phone on speaker the entire time. They exchange pleasantries and family updates before launching into far more serious topics, like whether Gaulden’s father should travel back to Baton Rouge for an upcoming court date. “Country boys up there will pop you just for talking to them. Them bitches is so racist,” the rapper says. “They do what they want, Dad. I swear, they’ll kill.”
Gaulden’s willingness to let me listen in on this harrowingly intimate phone call is the same quality that allows him to create music that moves so many people. Artifice is everything in contemporary music, particularly in the wake of AI, which makes his rawness—as inconvenient as it may be, at times—all the more exceptional.
This was no longer the Gaulden I just spoke to, but YoungBoy Never Broke Again, who, against all odds and entirely on his own terms, has ascended to a new kind of superstardom, performing in the streets of Paris as if he owned them. As I made my way to my hotel room at 3 a.m., I was reminded of similar late-night treks home through the French Quarter of New Orleans, many years back. Though I think both Gaulden and I would like to believe otherwise, it dawned on me that, no matter who you are or how far you come, no one can ever truly escape where they come from.
No comments
Post a Comment