why does lil yachty go by lil boat

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How to Tell the Difference Between Lil Yachty and Lil Boat

Atlanta-based mumble rapper Lil Yachty released his debut studio album,  “Teenage Emotions,” on May 26 and reintroduced us to his alter egos: Darnell Boat and Lil Boat.

Much like in Lil Yachty’s 2016 mixtape release, “Lil Boat,”  the red-mustachioed and wigged Darnell Boat introduces listeners to his nephews, Lil Yachty and Lil Boat, in the intro of the album. “Yachty and Boat have been working so hard over this past year, and we just want to welcome y’all to ‘Teenage Emotions,’” says Darnell Boat in the first song of the album, “Like A Star.” “They both have lots to say…this time I think Yachty wants to go first.” After, Uncle Darnell effectively leads fans into a concept album that displays the two distinct rap personas of Lil Yachty.

It can be difficult to differentiate between both Lil Boat and Lil Yachty as a first time listener. There are, however, a number of distinguishing traits displayed in both of their approaches to music and lyrics that can help successfully identify who’s who.

Music Style

In an interview with Genius , Lil Yachty said that the defining characteristic of Lil Boat is aggressiveness.” That word sums it all up, as Boat is the more masculine, foul-mouthed, confident rapper of the two. Boat seems to come out and say the things that Yachty feels he couldn’t get away with, while laying down dark and dirty verses to Atlanta-style trap beats in tracks like “DN Freestyle” and “Dirty Mouth.” “It’s all in production,” says Yachty in the interview. “If the beat is like, heavy hitting, that’s Boat.”

Yachty prefers the lighter tones of music, the kind of sound that he’s dubbed as “boat music” in the past. Tracks on the album such as “Better,” which features steel drums reminiscent of Jamaican island music, as well as the heavy-synth eighties-style track, “Bring It Back,” with a sprinkle of a saxophone solo, are all Yachty creations. He tends to lean toward high-pitched, heavily auto-tuned singing, as opposed to forced attempts at mumble rapping like Boat. Positivity and good vibes are common themes in Yachty’s lyrics.

In his bars, Lil Boat is, without a doubt, the typical misogynistic rap star that displays women as sexual objects. Constantly referring to women as “b*tches,” Boat likes to brag about having multiple women that only serve the sexual needs of him and his friends. Boat is only interested in what women can give him, and in songs like “Peek A Boo,” he shows just how little he cares about having meaningful relationships with them with lines like, “F*ck her then f*ck on her sister, I’m ruthless.”

“It’s not Yachty man,” says Yachty in response to that lyric in a separate interview with Genius . “In interviews, that’s Yachty. But that on that paper, that’s Lil Boat. He’s a ruthless dude. He don’t care. Yachty is a nice dude. That’s not him. At all. That n***a Boat, he crazy, know what I’m saying? You never know what he might do.”

Romantic, monogamous, vulnerable and semi-respectful, Yachty has a different approach to love. In tracks like “Forever Young” and “Lady In Yellow,” he sings about wanting to be together forever with his only girl. Showing more awareness of a woman’s agency over her body, Yachty is more concerned with pleasing women and doing what they want.

Though put rather ineloquently, lines like “Baby can I f*ck with you?” and “Let me love on you” are examples of Yachty showing a slight concern for consent. This is in sharp contrast with Boat’s lyrics calling for multiple women to perform oral sex on him, or “Blow like a cello,” which is probably the greatest lyrical oversight in history.

In short, if someone on Tinder were to find Twizzler-hair and multicolored mouth grills attractive, then they should swipe left on Boat and swipe right on Yachty.

It’s not hard to figure out how Boat feels about fame, as Boat is an acronym for “Best of All Time,” according to a tweet from Lil Yachty’s official account. Self-assured and confident, he’s been presenting himself as the self-proclaimed “King of the Teens” since his beginnings. Riding the fame and all that comes with it, Boat likes to rap about the money, cars and diamonds that he didn’t have just a few short years ago.

In contrast, Yachty is unsure of his standing as a public figure. In “Say My Name,” Yachty redundantly sings, “I want you to say my name, say my name, say my, say my name in the crowd,” hinting at his concern for how he is received by his audience, and the popularity he amasses from his fans. Yachty claims to be a normal teenager, (as normal as a six-figure teen can be), and with the emotional years of adolescence comes an inevitable uncertainty of his place in the world.

On Family and Peers

“I didn’t ask for respect, all I care about is that check,” raps Boat on “Dirty Mouth.” Boat doesn’t care about what people think, and he definitely doesn’t care about what the haters are saying about him. He’s just there to do him, and also attempt to emasculate his rivals by acting hard and likening them to female genitalia, like in “FYI (Know Now).”

Yachty is constantly singing about the “ice” on his mother’s wrist, or alluding to the hundred pairs of shoes his sister has in her closet in interviews. He cares about his family and he attributes a lot of his success to his mom. In the intro he sings, “Look mama you made a star,” and the outro, “Momma” is completely dedicated to her, bringing the gratitude full circle.

In his music, Yachty emulates the man that his mom raised him to be, while Boat is the reflection of Yachty as he sees himself fitting into the hip-hop world.

How It Comes Together

Listening to Lil Yachty’s discography is a human behavioral experiment on the effect that constant exposure to something initially unpleasant can have on the subject’s opinion. Someone once likened it to eating vegetables; they taste terrible at first, but become pretty good after recurring exposure. Nothing else captures the initial resistance to Yachty and Boat’s dichotomy and the new sound they create together; in addition to, the acceptance and appreciation by the listener that soon follows.

In its first week, only forty-six thousand copies of “Teenage Emotions” were sold. Lil Yachty’s heavy streaming presence on sites like Soundcloud , where he originally gained his cult following, and apps like Spotify , may have something to do with low sales, but he’s going on tour and working on new music regardless of its success.

Either way, Lil Yachty and his alter egos have undoubtedly made a name for themselves in the genre, whether they’re loved or hated; there are plenty who do both.

Brittany Sodic, University of North Texas

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Brittany sodic, university of north texas journalism - digital & print.

[…] To view the featured image click here To view the above image click here […]

[…] sides of the same coins, alternative personas of the same man. Yachty himself has stated that his alter-ego Boat is “crazy”, a fact we can see in how wildly different and more aggressive the lyricism is […]

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With his debut mixtape, ‘Lil Boat,’ Lil Yachty fully shed the mumble rap label, transitioning from SoundCloud sensation to major label star.

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Lil Yachty’s debut mixtape, Lil Boat , is one of the pre-eminent releases of the SoundCloud era. Released on March 9, 2016, it made Lil Yachty a star, spawned multiple hits, and further legitimized the DIY-style rap that emerged at the beginning of the decade.

The Atlanta MC entered the crowded rapper-singer fray with a work that’s split into two distinct sides, seeing him grapple with dueling elements of his personality and career. The first half of Lil Boat sees Yachty flex his flow, while the second half finds him crooning in AutoTune. That may be a slightly reductive way to look at the collection (in reality, he does both throughout), but there’s certainly a kind of TI vs TIP split-personality concept to the whole affair. Yachty uses his style to demarcate who is who, and, despite his glee throughout, Lil Boat is a surprisingly subtle work for the chaotic time it represents.

Listen to the best of Lil Yachty on Apple Music and Spotify.

A standout work

Yachty’s debut mixtape is a standout work for the usual reasons – great name, great cover, and two singles that will forever be associated with Yachty and the era from which he emerged: “One Night” and “Minnesota.”

As a title, Lil Boat was perfect. Serving two purposes at once, it created a fitting alt.moniker for the MC while helping a lot of people to pronounce his name (did you actually say it like “yacht”?). Nautical luxury isn’t the most commonly-evoked lifestyle in hip-hop (outside of Puffy), so that theme alone was enough to put Yachty in his own lane. And then there’s the artwork: not a yacht, barely even a boat; it’s basically a little wooden dinghy. Beautifully composed, the image looks like a classical painting, bordered in a red that matches Yachty’s hair. It’s almost Americana in tone – though Yachty’s music is anything but.

All hail “King Of The Youth”

Yachty may be poised and confident on that cover, but he’s also lost in the gloom at sea – an apt metaphor for the musical style he was leading. While not traditional in any sense, Yachty is honest with his emotions in a way that younger generations have always been, and Lil Boat found him attempting to navigate his way through the emotionally turbulent years of his late youth. Shortly after his breakout, Yachty would declare himself “King Of Teens” or, alternatively, “King Of The Youth.” This might have sounded ridiculous to adults who weren’t even sure how to pronounce his name, but those adults were no longer in charge. Lil Yachty was not part of some hip-hop assembly line; like other DIY pioneers before him, Yachty and his crew were making these songs at home, often in a matter of minutes.

Outside of the Vikings football team and Ice Cube ’s “What Can I Do?,” Minnesota doesn’t get name-checked very often in hip-hop. Simply naming a track after a state was seemingly in line with the aforementioned “half-Americana, half trolling” theme of Lil Boat – but, of course, the song isn’t actually about Minnesota. It’s more of a celebration of Lil Yachty’s arrival on the scene. The draw and significance of having both Quavo and Young Thug on a song in 2016 is hard to overstate, and their guest appearances turned “Minnesota” into a certified-gold hit. At the time, Quavo was just months away from releasing “Bad And Boujee,” while Thug was fresh off Barter 6 and in the middle of his Slime Season run. Together, he and Yachty appeared at Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion show, on February 11, where The Life Of Pablo received its public unveiling. Just two days after releasing his debut mixtape, Yachty was at the epicenter of one of hip-hop’s biggest cultural shifts.

Unprecedented moves

Lil Boat was big enough that Burberry Perry – Yachty’s right-hand man at the time and the producer behind most of the mixtape – came under pressure from the fashion label Burberry and was forced to change his name. That wasn’t exactly an unprecedented move, but the speed with which it happened certainly was. It’s not often that an internationally renowned fashion house serves a cease-and-desist to a kid who got famous on the internet and was barely old enough to vote.

Perry’s production on Lil Boat ’s lead single, “One Night’ (Yachty’s best-known song to date), guided the way for the rest of the collection. Even the beats he didn’t produce fall right in line, all cascading bells, and whistles alongside keys that let you hear Yachty’s grin throughout.

Lil Yachty’s emergence closely resembles that of the Odd Future collective, who, years earlier, more or less launched DIY rap on the internet (depending on how you view Lil B’s rise to fame). Seemingly overnight, Yachty was partnering with Urban Outfitters and the aptly titled Nautica clothing brand. His rapid ascent would have sounded like fan fiction just a few years earlier but, after his breakout, many artists began following his path to fame on a regular basis.

Having hit it big in such a short space of time, Yachty wasn’t about to slow down. He went on to guest (and absolutely steal the show) on “Broccoli,” a DRAM song with a Yachty-perfect beat. As one of the stars in Quality Control ’s shining roster, Yachty was operating alongside some of the biggest acts in hip-hop. With Lil Boat, he fully shed the “mumble rap” label, completing the transition from SoundCloud sensation to major label star.

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How Lil Yachty Got His Second Act

By Jeff Ihaza

Until the pandemic, Lil Yachty never stopped to think about how quickly he became famous. “It was a full year from walking across the stage in high school to then I’m in this penthouse in midtown Atlanta , I got this G-wagon, put my mother in a house,” Yachty explains. “It’s a fast life. You not ever getting the chance to think about a lot of shit.”

Yachty’s 2016 hit “Minnesota,” which had the treacly energy of a nursery rhyme, earned the then-17-year-old the title “King of the Teens.” But since then, he’s become an elder statesman of a certain brand of young superstar — and something like the Gen Z answer to Diddy. He collaborated with brands like Nautica and Target; he appeared in the movie How High 2 ; he signed an endorsement deal with Sprite. Signees to his new label imprint, Concrete Boys, even get an iced-out chain.

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Born Miles Parks McCollum, Yachty embodies many of the ways the music industry has changed in the past decade. He rose to fame on the internet and commands attention with or without new music. Over Zoom in March, he’s calm and reserved, pausing intently before he responds to questions. The youthful exuberance is still there, though. At one point, his mom, who lives nearby, calls to ask what he wants from the grocery store. “I need Pop-Tarts,” he says sweetly. “I really want them cinnamon-bun Pop-Tarts.”

He can afford lots of Pop-Tarts. Yachty reportedly made $13 million on endorsements in 2016 and 2017. (“Work hard, play hard,” he responds when asked about the number.) He spends more than $50,000 a month on various expenses, according to one recent headline. (“If anything I pay a little more. I have many assets and insurance, plus an elaborate payroll.”) He’s working on a Reese’s Puffs cereal collaboration, a film based on the card game Uno, and he was one of the first rappers to hop on the crypto craze, selling something called a “YachtyCoin” last December in an auction on the platform Nifty Gateway. According to a report from Coinbase, the token sold for $16,050. Yachty explains that when he was first discovered by Quality Control records founder Kevin “Coach K” Lee, “one of the biggest things he talked about was being a brand. Being bigger than just an artist — being a mogul.” 

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In fact, collaboration has come to be a useful tool for Yachty as he sheds the King of the Teens title for something more akin to a rap mogul. “I only work with people I have friendships with, who I really admire,” Yachty says. “And I love working with newer artists, up-and-coming artists.”  Within the world of hip-hop, Yachty has found for himself somewhere between a megastar and internet hero, and it would appear that he’s just settling in. “I just fuck with new talent. Not even like, ‘let me sign you, get under my wing,’ ” he explains. “Just ‘hey, I’ve been in this spot before. I know what that’s like, bada bing, bada boom.’ ”

Yachty started Concrete Boys last year. One of the first signees was his childhood friend Draft Day, who offers one of the more exciting features on Lil Boat 3, on the cut “Demon Time.” “I feel old sometimes,” Yachty admits. “I feel old as fuck when someone’s popping and I don’t know who they are. Which is rare, because I be on my shit.”

Yachty is also at the forefront of a new realm of social platforms, namely Twitch and Discord, that engender more direct communication within communities. Yachty frequently talks directly to fans on both platforms, and in April he collaborated with Discord on “sound packs,” which allowed users to replace the app’s normal notifications with sounds he created. 

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I ask Yachty where he sees himself in five years. “Hopefully, a really successful actor,” he responds. “And with a bangin’ eight pack. I’ll probably cut my hair up, maybe a little beard. Real sex-symbol shit, you know what I’m saying?” For Yachty, who opened the door to a new brand of celebrity rapper, it doesn’t register as wishful thinking. His enduring celebrity is proof of what’s possible with a solid flow and internet savvy. “I just want to do everything. Because I’ve realized I can,” Yachty explains. “I’ve learned the power I have. The only thing stopping me is me, for real.”

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Lil Yachty Is Out to Claim What He Rightfully Deserves Ahead of Lil Boat 3 Album

Respect My Conglomerate Four years in the school of hard knocks has taught Lil Yachty that credit isn’t always given where it’s due. Now the Atlanta rapper is out to claim what he rightfully deserves. Words: Georgette Cline Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of XXL Magazine, on stands now.

Based on the quarter-sized 10.5 carat diamond sailboat earrings dangling from Lil Yachty ’s ears on this February morning in New York City, diamonds aren’t just a girl’s best friend. The $98,000 jewelry the Atlanta rapper copped from jeweler Wafi is certainly on brand for Yachty, who is at a yoga studio around the corner from the Big Apple’s famed Diamond District. But today, instead of dropping racks on racks on racks on another iced-out chain or bracelet, Yachty is sweating his ass off down the street. He’s inside an 80-degree heated room at AtthenaYoga learning how to be a yogi.

“I feel like I’m begging for mercy,” the 22-year-old artist exclaims while he’s positioned on a red (his favorite color) mat with his arms out in front of him on the floor, head down and legs tucked under his body. Atthena Breitton, his instructor for the private class, informs Yachty, dressed in black Nike Pro workout gear, that she’ll be getting him into “a lot of fun shapes that are different.”

The “One Night” rhymer’s commentary as he goes from sinking his belly (“You giving me arch lessons right now”) to engaging his core while lifting his knees (“I’m shaking, what the fuck?”) to trying a plank pose (“This some punishment shit”) is comical, yet endearing. Don’t underestimate Lil Boat’s abilities. For a guy who eats pizza daily and never consumes fruits or vegetables, hot yoga is pushing himself to the limit, but he’s holding it down. “You’re pulling me apart like pizza dough,” says Yachty, a fitting response as he likens his favorite food to Breitton maneuvering his limbs into yoga poses.

Downward-Facing Dog is up next. “Think of a dog making a little mountain pose with its body,” instructs Breitton. “Why would a dog do that?” Yachty utters, seemingly irked at the thought. The groans grow louder, the poses get more technical and the heat is stifling. “Are you stressed about your upcoming album?” the instructor inquires, to which Yachty can’t even concentrate to give a valid response. “I don’t know right now,” he replies. “It’s a lot.”

Two hours later after picking up $12,000 worth of Jean Paul Gaultier, Yohji Yamamoto and Walter Van Beirendonck clothing at Middleman Instagram boutique, Yachty is seated inside the lounge area at Capital Records Midtown Manhattan offices. Domino’s pizza, assistant Maddy, videographer Ari and manager Kevin “Coach K” Lee, cofounder of Quality Control Music to which Yachty is signed, surround him. He’s no longer sweaty from his hot yoga adventure, and confesses it did nothing to relax him.

Yachty’s about to play “Oprah’s Bank Account” featuring Drake and DaBaby , the official first single from his upcoming fourth studio album, Lil Boat 3 , due this spring. The project’s cover will feature a black-and-white photo of a 2-year-old little Yachty that his father snapped. The album is scheduled to officially culminate the LB series.

Four years ago, Yachty, born Miles McCollum, was an 18-year-old neophyte just entering the rap game with his debut mixtape, Lil Boat . He crafted colorful, convivial bops like his platinum-selling “One Night” and gold-certified “Minnesota,” became a poster child for mumble rap—though he’ll argue against the designation when applied to him—introduced the masses to the motley crew known as the Sailing Team and reigned as the “King of Teens” with his succinct, monotonous delivery and straight-edge tendencies. Whether it was online, in a Sprite commercial or a Target ad on TV, his signature red hair and beaded braids were seemingly everywhere.

And the music kept flooding in, as constant as the crimson on his head. 2016 also welcomed Yachty’s Summer Songs 2 mixtape , plus projects Big Boat and The Lost Files with Digital Nas . The following year ushered in his debut album, Teenage Emotions , Yachty’s earnest attempt at a commercial project and highest-charting effort, coming in at No. 5 on the Billboard 200. In 2018, he was busy with his sophomore LP, Lil Boat 2 , the Birthday Mix 3.0 , his stellar writing credits on City Girls’ platinum-selling, Earl on the Beat-produced banger “Act Up” and his Nuthin’ 2 Prove opus, the latter of which kicked off with the minacious ode “Gimmie My Respect”: “Niggas gon’ keep forgetting about who goddamn started this muhfuckin’ new wave shit, bruh/Come on, man, gimme my respect, bitch.”

Despite the work put in and the accolades, there are still people that think Lil Yachty can’t rap. His personal statement for the last two years has been apparent across social media: he’s been vocal about his ability to out-rap 75 percent of the new generation, feels slept-on but has nothing to prove. For his own benefit, last year, he took a step back from the spotlight and releasing music except for the SoundCloud freestyle “Go Krazy, Go Stupid” and his collaborative work on the Quality Control: Control the Streets, Vol. 2 compilation. Caliginous Boat, as he describes himself, was in full effect. “I didn’t put any music out,” recalls Yachty, who cites Lil B, Kid Cudi, Soulja Boy and Kanye West as artists who made him want to rap on the come up while Coldplay is his favorite band. “I just was real low-key. So, it’s just like being real low-key, just under the radar, you know what I mean? That’s what I meant by that.” Like a senior in high school preparing to head into his first year of college, Yachty hunkered down.

The last year was the longest stretch of time he’s gone without dropping consistent music, an occurrence he promises won’t happen again. Relevancy is key. Though time spent out of the public eye didn’t mean he was sitting idle. For roughly two years, Yachty was perfecting Lil Boat 3 , an album he recorded four times over before submitting the final effort to the label in early 2020. “I kept going through so many different phases of creativity,” Yachty admits. Black Hair Boat being one of them. Gone is the bright-red head full of hair he was once synonymous with; now bloodshot tips are all that remain.

The new ’do is reflective of taking it back to the basics. No so-called gimmicks, so the focus is strictly on the bars. His recent feature run is indicative of this: Sada Baby’s 30 Roc-produced “SB5,” Duke Deuce’s “Crunk Ain’t Dead Mob” with Lil Thad, Tadoe’s “Get It Bussin” and “Speed Me Up” with Wiz Khalifa, Ty Dolla $ign and Sueco The Child, to name a few. Each track reflects Yachty’s punchy brand of lyrical wizardry, clever couplets included.

“Give me my credit,” demands Yachty, referring to both his rhymes and his ’fits. “I feel like I’m slept-on in general, just period. I’m not saying I’m the best, you know, I never can say I’m the best rapper, or even if I was best-dressed. But I do this shit. For real. It don’t break me. I’m still here… That’s ’cause I’m really a fly nigga. I don’t get enough credit for it. I feel like I’m one of the best-dressed rappers in the rap game. And no one gives me any credit. And it upsets me. Not even upsetting, but it upsets me. It’s like, yeah, y’all just playing with me right now. I don’t have no stylist for real.”

As he leans back on the couch in the Capitol Records lounge, (Capitol is QC’s parent company) dressed in a vintage hunter green and mustard Nike letterman jacket decorated with The Beverly Hillbillies logo, vintage Evisu denim jeans stitched with dice, chocolate brown Air Force 2s and a green-and-white trucker hat, it’s clear Yachty’s style is fresh, but his new music is what’s on the agenda right now. Yachty’s new single “Oprah’s Bank Account,” produced by his childhood friend Earl on the Beat, is bittersweet as it signals the beginning of the end of the Lil Boat series. Once Yachty presses play on the melodic, uptempo track, it’s apparent how the song got its title. “Diamond in the rough, you look as good as Oprah’s bank account,” he raps.

Drake hopped on the beat after Yachty previewed the song on his Finsta page (Boat's secondary private Instagram account) late last year. DaBaby linked with Lil Boat in an Atlanta studio last October to add his signature sound. “It was fire,” Earl on the Beat remembers of DaBaby’s studio session. “They got in. We were there, we was chillin’. DaBaby came in, he was cool. Had a blunt. The blunt started going, started recording.”

According to Earl, he has roughly nine songs he produced on Yachty’s new album, which will feature throwback 2016 melodies the rapper built his career on. Overall, Yachty describes Lil Boat 3 as an uptempo experience featuring further production from Pi’erre Bourne, 30 Roc and MitchGoneMad. “I just hope it provides good tunes for the youth,” Yachty says. After the album's spring release, Yachty already has another project lined up to release around his birthday, Aug. 23. “ End of the Summer ,” he reveals of the tentative title. “And just make it a summer feel.” And then there’s a string of collab projects he has hopes for with three producers he knows all too well: 30 Roc, Earl and Pi’erre, the latter of whom Yachty would like to join forces with as an artist, too. “I’m a big fan of his music,” Yachty affirms.

2020 isn’t just solely about witnessing Lil Yachty on the mic either. He’s got goals outside the booth. “I love acting,” he admits. “It’s really cool.” With six official projects ranging from mixtapes to albums currently under his belt, Yachty sees a future in which he graduates from hip-hop. “I don’t plan on being a rapper forever.” He’s already landed roles as the voice of Green Lantern in the 2018 animated film Teen Titans! Go to the Movies and the 2019 comedy How High 2 , in which he plays a teen stoner named Roger who discovers a secret strain of weed. Now he has two more movies and a spot in a television show on the way; one of the three is based on his life story. He’s hush on any further details. Yachty’s dream role? To play a killer similar to the character Rico in Paid in Full . Rappers-turned-actors like Will Smith also inspire him and prove making the jump to a successful acting career is possible.

Watching Yachty land TV and movie gigs in real time motivates Earl, who’s known the Grammy Award-nominated artist since they were 7 years old growing up in ATL. “This nigga’s a star,” Earl maintains. “When you see somebody that you actually grew up with, that you actually go to school with, that you actually be doing day to day shit with go and do this shit... you just be like, damn, that’s fire. And you get inspired. Man, my nigga is a businessman, bro. This nigga is a jack of all trades. This nigga really do this shit.”

Coach K has also seen Yachty’s progression firsthand, having signed the rapper at the age of 18, shortly after Yachty left Alabama State University, where he attended for two months. “It’s crazy, we signed Yachty in 2016,” Coach K reflects. “In school, it’s like four years of high school and then you graduate and go to college. This last year, he’s taking the time, it’s like his senior year in high school. And it’s like he’s been preparing himself to get ready for college, you know? When you get ready to go to college, it’s like you’re on your own, a lot of things start changing, you’re kinda in between from here to there. I think it’s when he took this year out, you know, in really just discovering [himself]. There’s a lot of things he did in the film industry and now I think that’s what brung everything back to completion. We worked this [ Lil Boat 3 ] album for the last year-and-a-half. I’ve seen him turn me in four albums… You never want to get in the way of the artist and their process… I think it’s in those four years, he’s had time to grow up and figure out who he is. He was the ‘King of the Teens’ when we first signed him, he’s still young as hell, you know? It’s that transition. He’s come into himself.”

And moved up in tax brackets, too. Just three years shy of hitting 25, Lil Yachty is a self-proclaimed millionaire. Buying a $400 Denim Tears Black Jesus blanket as he randomly scrolls through Instagram is as standard as eating pizza every day. In Yachty’s world, both are the norm. More money may bring more problems depending on who you ask, but when you’ve been able to keep the same circle of friends since kindergarten like Yachty has, life is good. His reality will be even better once Lil Boat 3 arrives. “It’s a heavy-hitting album,” he promises. “I’m ready to drop. My god. I want to put it out so bad.” Coach K believes this project will further solidify Lil Yachty as not only a trendsetter who breaks barriers, but an artist deserving of his credit. “I’ma get my respect before I’m done,” Yachty adds. “I’ma get it.”

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How Lil Yachty Ended Up at His Excellent New Psychedelic Album Let's Start Here

By Brady Brickner-Wood

The evening before Lil Yachty released his fifth studio album,  Let’s Start Here,  he  gathered an IMAX theater’s worth of his fans and famous friends at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City and made something clear: He wanted to be taken seriously. Not just as a “Soundcloud rapper, not some mumble rapper, not some guy that just made one hit,” he told the crowd before pressing play on his album. “I wanted to be taken serious because music is everything to me.” 

There’s a spotty history of rappers making dramatic stylistic pivots, a history Yachty now joins with  Let’s Start Here,  a funk-flecked psychedelic rock album. But unlike other notable rap-to-rock faceplants—Kid Cudi’s  Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven  comes to mind, as does Lil Wayne’s  Rebirth —the record avoids hackneyed pastiche and gratuitous playacting and cash-grabbing crossover singles; instead, Yachty sounds unbridled and free, a rapper creatively liberated from the strictures of mainstream hip-hop. Long an oddball who’s delighted in defying traditional rap ethos and expectations,  Let’s Start Here  is a maximalist and multi-genre undertaking that rewrites the narrative of Yachty’s curious career trajectory. 

Admittedly, it’d be easy to write off the album as Tame Impala karaoke, a gimmicky record from a guy who heard Yves Tumor once and thought: Let’s do  that . But set aside your Yachty skepticism and probe the album’s surface a touch deeper. While the arrangements tend toward the obvious, the record remains an intricate, unraveling swell of sumptuous live instruments and reverb-drenched textures made more impressive by the fact that Yachty co-produced every song. Fielding support from an all-star cast of characters, including production work from former Chairlift member Patrick Wimberly, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Jacob Portrait, Justin Raisen, Nick Hakim, and Magdalena Bay, and vocals from Daniel Caesar, Diana Gordon,  Foushée , Justine Skye, and Teezo Touchdown, Yachty surrounds himself with a group of disparately talented collaborators. You can hear the acute attention to detail and wide-scale ambition in the spaced-out denouement on “We Saw the Sun!” or on the blistering terror of “I’ve Officially Lost Vision!!!!” or during the cool romanticism of “Say Something.” Though occasionally overindulgent,  Let’s Start Here  is a spectacular statement from hip-hop’s prevailing weirdo. It’s not shocking that Yachty took another hard left—but how exactly did he end up  here ?

In 2016, as the forefather of “bubblegum trap” ascended into mainstream consciousness, an achievement like  Let’s Start Here  would’ve seemed inconceivable. The then 18-year-old Yachty gained national attention when a pair of his songs, “One Night” and “Minnesota,” went viral. Though clearly indebted to hip-hop trailblazers Lil B, Chief Keef, and Young Thug, his work instantly stood apart from the gritted-teeth toughness of his Atlanta trap contemporaries. Yachty flaunted a childlike awe and cartoonish demeanor that communicated a swaggering, unbothered cool. His singsong flows and campy melodies contained a winking humor to them, a subversive playfulness that endeared him to a generation of very online kids who saw themselves in Yachty’s goofy, eccentric persona. He starred in Sprite  commercials alongside LeBron James, performed live shows at the  Museum of Modern Art , and modeled in Kanye West’s  Life of Pablo  listening event at Madison Square Garden. Relishing in his cultural influence, he declared to the  New York Times  that he was not a rapper but an  artist. “And I’m more than an artist,” he added. “I’m a brand.”

 As Sheldon Pearce pointed out in his Pitchfork  review of Yachty’s 2016 mixtape,  Lil Boat , “There isn’t a single thing Lil Yachty’s doing that someone else isn’t doing better, and in richer details.” He wasn’t wrong. While Yachty’s songs were charming and catchy (and, sometimes, convincing), his music was often tangential to his brand. What was the point of rapping as sharply as the Migos or singing as intensely as Trippie Redd when you’d inked deals with Nautica and Target, possessed a sixth-sense for going viral, and had incoming collaborations with Katy Perry and Carly Rae Jepsen? What mattered more was his presentation: the candy-red hair and beaded braids, the spectacular smile that showed rows of rainbow-bedazzled grills, the wobbly, weak falsetto that defaulted to a chintzy nursery rhyme cadence. He didn’t need technical ability or historical reverence to become a celebrity; he was a meme brought to life, the personification of hip-hop’s growing generational divide, a sudden star who, like so many other Soundcloud acts, seemed destined to crash and burn after a fleeting moment in the sun.

 One problem: the music wasn’t very good. Yachty’s debut album, 2017’s  Teenage Emotions, was a glitter-bomb of pop-rap explorations that floundered with shaky hooks and schmaltzy swings at crossover hits. Worse, his novelty began to fade, those sparkly, cheerful, and puerile bubblegum trap songs aging like day-old french fries. Even when he hued closer to hard-nosed rap on 2018’s  Lil Boat 2  and  Nuthin’ 2 Prove,  you could feel Yachty desperate to recapture the magic that once came so easily to him. But rap years are like dog years, and by 2020, Yachty no longer seemed so radically weird. He was an established rapper making mid mainstream rap. The only question now was whether we’d already seen the best of him.

If his next moves were any indication—writing the  theme song to the  Saved by the Bell  sitcom revival and announcing his involvement in an upcoming  movie based on the card game Uno—then the answer was yes. But in April 2021, Yachty dropped  Michigan Boat Boy,  a mixtape that saw him swapping conventional trap for Detroit and Flint’s fast-paced beats and plain-spoken flows. Never fully of a piece with his Atlanta colleagues, Yachty found a cohort of kindred spirits in Michigan, a troop of rappers whose humor, imagination, and debauchery matched his own. From the  looks of it, leaders in the scene like Babyface Ray, Rio Da Yung OG, and YN Jay embraced Yachty with open arms, and  Michigan Boat Boy  thrives off that communion. 

 Then “ Poland ” happened. When Yachty uploaded the minute-and-a-half long track to Soundcloud a few months back, he received an unlikely and much needed jolt. Building off the rage rap production he played with on the  Birthday Mix 6  EP, “Poland” finds Yachty’s warbling about carrying pharmaceutical-grade cough syrup across international borders, a conceit that captured the imagination of TikTok and beyond. Recorded as a joke and released only after a leaked version went viral, the song has since amassed over a hundred-millions streams across all platforms. With his co-production flourishes (and adlibs) splattered across Drake and 21 Savage’s  Her Loss,  fans had reason to believe that Yachty’s creative potential had finally clicked into focus.

 But  Let’s Start Here  sounds nothing like “Poland”—in fact, the song doesn’t even appear on the project. Instead, amid a tapestry of scabrous guitars, searing bass, and vibrant drums, Yachty sounds right at home on this psych-rock spectacle of an album. He rarely raps, but his singing often relies on the virtues of his rapping: those greased-vowel deliveries and unrushed cadences, the autotune-sheathed vibrato. “Pretty,” for instance, is decidedly  not  a rap song—but what is it, then? It’s indebted to trap as much as it is ’90s R&B and MGMT, its drugged-out drums and warm keys able to house an indeterminate amount of ideas.

Yachty didn’t need to abandon hip-hop to find himself as an artist, but his experimental impulses helped him craft his first great album. Perhaps this is his lone dalliance in psych rock—maybe a return to trap is imminent. Or, maybe, he’ll make another 180, or venture deeper into the dystopia of corporate sponsorships. Who’s to say? For now, it’s invigorating to see Yachty shake loose the baggage of his teenage virality and emerge more fully into his adult artistic identity. His guise as a boundary-pushing rockstar isn’t a new archetype, but it’s an archetype he’s infused with his glittery idiosyncrasies. And look what he’s done: he’s once again morphed into a star the world didn’t see coming.

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Lil Yachty On His Big Rock Pivot: ‘F-ck Any of the Albums I Dropped Before This One’

With his adventurous, psychedelic new album, 'Let's Start Here,' he's left mumble rap behind — and finally created a project he's proud of.

By Lyndsey Havens

Lyndsey Havens

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Lil Yachty, presented by Doritos, will perform at Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW on March 16 .

Lil Yachty: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot

Someone has sparked a blunt in the planetarium.

It may be a school night, but no one has come to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J., to learn. Instead, the hundreds of fans packed into the domed theater on Jan. 26 have come to hear Lil Yachty’s latest album as he intended: straight through — and with an open mind. Or, as Yachty says with a mischievous smile: “I hope y’all took some sh-t.”

For the next 57 minutes and 16 seconds, graphics of exploding spaceships, green giraffes and a quiet road through Joshua Tree National Park accompany Yachty’s sonically divergent — and at this point, unreleased — fifth album, Let’s Start Here . For a psychedelic rock project that plays like one long song, the visual aids not only help attendees embrace the bizarre, but also function as a road map for Yachty’s far-out trip, signaling that there is, in fact, a tracklist.

It’s a night the artist has arguably been waiting for his whole career — to finally release an album he feels proud of. An album that was, he says, made “from scratch” with all live instrumentation. An album that opens with a nearly seven-minute opus, “the BLACK seminole.,” that he claims he had to fight most of his collaborative team to keep as one, not two songs. An album that, unlike his others, has few features and is instead rich with co-writers like Mac DeMarco, Nick Hakim, Alex G and members of MGMT, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Chairlift. An album he believes will finally earn him the respect and recognition he has always sought.

Sitting in a Brooklyn studio in East Williamsburg not far from where he made most of Let’s Start Here in neighboring Greenpoint, it’s clear he has been waiting to talk about this project in depth for some time. Yachty is an open book, willing to answer anything — and share any opinion. (Especially on the slice of pizza he has been brought, which he declares “tastes like ass.”) Perhaps his most controversial take at the moment? “F-ck any of the albums I dropped before this one.”

His desire to move on from his past is understandable. When Yachty entered the industry in his mid-teens with his 2016 major-label debut, the Lil Boat mixtape, featuring the breakout hit “One Night,” he found that along with fame came sailing the internet’s choppy waters. Skeptics often took him to task for not knowing — or caring, maybe — about rap’s roots, and he never shied away from sharing hot takes on Twitter. With his willingness and ability to straddle pop and hip-hop, Yachty produced music he once called “bubble-gum trap” (he has since denounced that phrase) that polarized audiences and critics. Meanwhile, his nonchalant delivery got him labeled as a mumble rapper — another identifier he was never fond of because it felt dismissive of his talent.

“There’s a lot of kids who haven’t heard any of my references,” he continues. “They don’t know anything about Bon Iver or Pink Floyd or Black Sabbath or James Brown. I wanted to show people a different side of me — and that I can do anything, most importantly.”

Let’s Start Here is proof. Growing up in Atlanta, the artist born Miles McCollum was heavily influenced by his father, a photographer who introduced him to all kinds of sounds. Yachty, once easily identifiable by his bright red braids, found early success by posting songs like “One Night” to SoundCloud, catching the attention of Kevin “Coach K” Lee, co-founder/COO of Quality Control Music, now home to Migos, Lil Baby and City Girls. In 2015, Coach K began managing Yachty, who in summer 2016 signed a joint-venture deal with Motown, Capitol Records and Quality Control.

“Yachty was me when I was 18 years old, when I signed him. He was actually me,” says Coach K today. (In 2021, Adam Kluger, whose clients include Bhad Bhabie, began co-managing Yachty.) “All the eclectic, different things, we shared that with each other. He had been wanting to make this album from the first day we signed him. But you know — coming as a hip-hop artist, you have to play the game.”

Yachty played it well. To date, he has charted 17 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 , including two top 10 hits for his features on DRAM’s melodic 2016 smash “Broccoli” and Kyle’s 2017 pop-rap track “iSpy.” His third-highest-charting entry arrived unexpectedly last year: the 93-second “Poland,” a track Yachty recorded in about 10 minutes where his warbly vocals more closely resemble singing than rapping. ( Let’s Start Here collaborator SADPONY saw “Poland” as a temperature check that proved “people are going to like this Yachty.”)

Beginning with 2016’s Lil Boat mixtape, all eight of Yachty’s major-label-released albums and mixtapes have charted on the Billboard 200 . Three have entered the top 10, including Let’s Start Here , which debuted and peaked at No. 9. And while Yachty has only scored one No. 1 album before ( Teenage Emotions topped Rap Album Sales), Let’s Start Here debuted atop three genre charts: Top Rock & Alternative Albums , Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums .

“It feels good to know that people in that world received this so well,” says Motown Records vp of A&R Gelareh Rouzbehani. “I think it’s a testament to Yachty going in and saying, ‘F-ck what everyone thinks. I’m going to create something that I’ve always wanted to make — and let us hope the world f-cking loves it.’ ”

Yet despite Let’s Start Here ’s many high-profile supporters, some longtime detractors and fans alike were quick to criticize certain aspects of it, from its art — Yachty quote-tweeted one remark , succinctly replying, “shut up” — to the music itself. Once again, he found himself facing another tidal wave of discourse. But this time, he was ready to ride it. “This release,” Kluger says, “gave him a lot of confidence.”

“I was always kind of nervous to put out music, but now I’m on some other sh-t,” Yachty says. “It was a lot of self-assessing and being very real about not being happy with where I was musically, knowing I’m better than where I am. Because the sh-t I was making did not add up to the sh-t I listened to.

“I just wanted more,” he continues. “I want to be remembered. I want to be respected.”

Last spring, Lil Yachty gathered his family, collaborators and team at famed Texas studio complex Sonic Ranch.

“I remember I got there at night and drove down because this place is like 30 miles outside El Paso,” Coach K says. “I walked in the room and just saw all these instruments and sh-t, and the vibe was just so ill. And I just started smiling. All the producers were in the room, his assistant, his dad. Yachty comes in, puts the album on. We got to the second song, and I told everybody, ‘Stop the music.’ I walked over to him and just said, ‘Man, give me a hug.’ I was like, ‘Yachty, I am so proud of you.’ He came into the game bold, but [to make] this album, you have to be very bold. And to know that he finally did it, it was overwhelming.”

SADPONY (aka Jeremiah Raisen) — who executive-produced Let’s Start Here and, in doing so, spent nearly eight straight months with Yachty — says the time at Sonic Ranch was the perfect way to cap off the months of tunnel vision required while making the album in Brooklyn. “That was new alone,” says Yachty. “I’ve recorded every album in Atlanta at [Quality Control]. That was the first time I recorded away from home. First time I recorded with a new engineer,” Miles B.A. Robinson, a Saddle Creek artist.

Yachty couldn’t wait to put it out, and says he turned it in “a long time ago. I think it was just label sh-t and trying to figure out the right time to release it.” For Coach K, it was imperative to have the physical product ready on release date, given that Yachty had made “an experience” of an album. And lately, most pressing plants have an average turnaround time of six to eight months.

Fans, however, were impatient. On Christmas, one month before Let’s Start Here would arrive, the album leaked online. It was dubbed Sonic Ranch . “Everyone was home with their families, so no one could pull it off the internet,” recalls Yachty. “That was really depressing and frustrating.”

Then, weeks later, the album art, tracklist and release date also leaked. “My label made a mistake and sent preorders to Amazon too early, and [the site] posted it,” Yachty says. “So I wasn’t able to do the actual rollout for my album that I wanted to. Nothing was a secret anymore. It was all out. I had a whole plan that I had to cancel.” He says the biggest loss was various videos he made to introduce and contextualize the project, all of which “were really weird … [But] I wasn’t introducing it anymore. People already knew.” Only one, called “Department of Mental Tranquility,” made it out, just days before the album.

Yachty says he wasn’t necessarily seeking a mental escape before making Let’s Start Here , but confesses that acid gave him one anyway. “I guess maybe the music went along with it,” he says. The album title changed four or five times, he says, from Momentary Bliss (“It was meant to take you away from reality … where you’re truly listening”) to 180 Degrees (“Because it’s the complete opposite of anything I’ve ever done, but people were like, ‘It’s too on the nose’ ”) to, ultimately, Let’s Start Here — the best way, he decided, to succinctly summarize where he was as an artist: a seven-year veteran, but at 25 years old, still eager to begin a new chapter.

Taking inspiration from Dark Side , Yachty relied on three women’s voices throughout the album, enlisting Fousheé, Justine Skye and Diana Gordon. Otherwise, guest vocals are spare. Daniel Caesar features on album closer “Reach the Sunshine.,” while the late Bob Ross (of The Joy of Painting fame) has a historic posthumous feature on “We Saw the Sun!”

Rouzbehani tells Billboard that Ross’ estate declined Yachty’s request at first: “I think a big concern of theirs was that Yachty is known as a rapper, and Bob Ross and his brand are very clean. They didn’t want to associate with anything explicit.” But Yachty was adamant, and Rouzbehani played the track for Ross’ team and also sent the entire album’s lyrics to set the group at ease. “With a lot of back-and-forth, we got the call,” she says. “Yachty is the first artist that has gotten a Bob Ross clearance in history.”

From the start, Coach K believed Let’s Start Here would open lots of doors for Yachty — and ultimately, other artists, too. Questlove may have said it best, posting the album art on Instagram with a lengthy caption that read in part: “this lp might be the most surprising transition of any music career I’ve witnessed in a min, especially under the umbrella of hip hop … Sh-t like this (envelope pushing) got me hyped about music’s future.”

Recently, Lil Yachty held auditions for an all-women touring band. “It was an experience for like Simon Cowell or Randy [Jackson],” he says, offering a simple explanation for the choice: “In my life, women are superheroes.”

And according to Yachty, pulling off his show will take superhuman strength: “Because the show has to match the album. It has to be big.” As eager as he was to release Let’s Start Here , he’s even more antsy to perform it live — but planning a tour, he says, required gauging the reaction to it. “This is so new for me, and to be quite honest with you, the label [didn’t] know how [the album] would do,” he says. “Also, I haven’t dropped an album in like three years. So we don’t even know how to plan a tour right now because it has been so long and my music is so different.”

While Yachty’s last full-length studio album, Lil Boat 3 , arrived in 2020, he released the Michigan Boy Boat mixtape in 2021, a project as reverential of the state’s flourishing hip-hop scenes in Detroit and Flint as Let’s Start Here is of its psych-rock touchstones. And though he claims he doesn’t do much with his days, his recent accomplishments, both musical and beyond, suggest otherwise. He launched his own cryptocurrency, YachtyCoin, at the end of 2020; signed his first artist, Draft Day, to his Concrete Boyz label at the start of 2021; invested in the Jewish dating app Lox Club; and launched his own line of frozen pizza, Yachty’s Pizzeria, last September. (He has famously declared he has never eaten a vegetable; at his Jersey City listening event, there was an abundance of candy, doughnut holes and Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts.)

But there are only two things that seem to remotely excite him, first and foremost of which is being a father. As proud as he is of Let’s Start Here , he says it comes in second to having his now 1-year-old daughter — though he says with a laugh that she “doesn’t really give a f-ck” about his music yet. “I haven’t played [this album] for her, but her mom plays her my old stuff,” he continues. “The mother of my child is Dominican and Puerto Rican, so she loves Selena — she plays her a lot . [We watch] the Selena movie with Jennifer Lopez a sh-t ton and a lot of Disney movie sh-t, like Frozen , Lion King and that type of vibe.”

Aside from being a dad, he most cares about working with other artists. Recently, he flew eight of his biggest fans — most of whom he has kept in touch with for years — to Atlanta. He had them over, played Let’s Start Here , took them to dinner and bowling, introduced them to his mom and dad, and then showed them a documentary he made for the album. (He’s not sure if he’ll release it.) One of the fans is an aspiring rapper; naturally, the two made a song together.

Yachty wants to keep working with artists and producers outside of hip-hop, mentioning the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and even sharing his dream of writing a ballad for Elton John. (“I know I could write him a beautiful song.”) With South Korean music company HYBE’s recent purchase of Quality Control — a $300 million deal — Yachty’s realm of possibility is bigger than ever.

But he’s not ruling out his genre roots. Arguably, Let’s Start Here was made for the peers and heroes he played it for first — and was inspired by hip-hop’s chameleons. “I would love to do a project with Tyler [The Creator],” says Yachty. “He’s the reason I made this album. He’s the one who told me to do it, just go for it. He’s so confident and I have so much respect for him because he takes me seriously, and he always has.”

Penske Media Corp. is the largest shareholder of SXSW ; its brands are official media partners of SXSW.

This story originally appeared in the March 11, 2023, issue of Billboard.

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A few months before the release of Lil Boat 3, Lil Yachty made the decision to stop dyeing his hair the vibrant red that once helped him to stand out in an emergent class of MCs that included 21 Savage, Kodak Black, and Lil Uzi Vert. Some four years after that rookie campaign, now on the third edition of his namesake franchise, Lil Boat is established enough as a voice and personality that he no longer needs the “I know that guy” it factor those bright red braids once gave him. (And the dye was destroying his hair.) But outside of his mop’s color—and the zeros in his bank account, presumably—very little has changed for the 22-year-old MC as he delivers the follow-up to 2018’s Nuthin’ 2 Prove. The Yachty of Lil Boat 3 is very much the sweet, spacey, and lyrically ambitious MC fans fell for over the course of the five full-length projects he’s released. This latest edition, whose production comes courtesy of some of Southern rap’s most consistently in-demand producers (Earl on the Beat, jetsonmade, and Pi’erre Bourne, among others), is built on hefty 808 gong, the gaps in between making up a perfect backdrop for Yachty’s Auto-Tuned toasting. Topically, Lil Boat 3 is mostly about the freewheeling lifestyle Yachty enjoys, a perk of which would seem to be the endless amount of time the MC can spend turning up with his loved ones. This is a privilege that manifests itself on the record by way of several blockbuster collaborations, including “Oprah’s Bank Account” (Drake and DaBaby), “T.D” (Tyler, The Creator, A$AP Rocky, and Tierra Whack), and “Till The Morning,” which features Young Thug and Lil Durk.

May 29, 2020 19 Songs, 53 minutes Quality Control Music/Motown Records; ℗ 2020 Quality Control Music, LLC, under exclusive license to UMG Recordings, Inc.

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What Does a Drake Feature Mean for an Album? ‘Everything,’ Says Rapper Lil Yachty

The Atlanta talent releases "Lil Boat 3" today.

By Shirley Ju

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Lil Yachty is no stranger to breaking the internet. In March, he dropped the track “Oprah’s Bank Account” featuring Drake and DaBaby along with a nine-minute visual that lampooned the entertainment mogul, played by the rapper himself, and her talk show. The clip was directed by Director X and featured Yachty costumed in a dress and high heels and ignited its share of backlash. One Twitter user on Twitter claimed the artist “fell off” and was just trying to “sell records.”

Yachty was quick to shut down such criticism, clapping back on social media: “Bitch, it’s just supposed to be entertaining… it ain’t even that deep, y’all N–a’s so in denial with y’all masculinity shit like this bother y’all.. Relax.”

Bitch it’s just supposed to be entertaining… it ain’t even that deep, y’all Nigga’s so in denial with y’all masculinity shit like this bother y’all.. relax https://t.co/Ql2NZCdY1C — stealth level boat (@lilyachty) March 11, 2020

Still, it was a bold move to poke at the beloved celebrity and her deep pockets. Defending the clip, Yachty tells Variety , “I was trying to say Oprah’s rich as f–k. If you look like her bank account, then you look pretty damn good. It’s about being fine. Like, you look good!”

Signed to Quality Control / Capitol Records / Motown Records , the 22-year-old born Miles McCollum exploded onto the Atlanta rap scene four years ago with his standout single “One Night” and debut mixtape, 2016’s “Lil Boat.” Capturing a young fanbase with his playful hits, he’s been working towards releasing his multi-part Lil Boat trilogy, the final third chapter out today (May 29).

Popular on Variety

With “Lil Boat 3,” Yachty enters a new phase musically. “Vibes,” says Yachty of the 19-track collection. “Seriously, it’s uptempo. I got some slappers on there and it’s fun.”

Yachty’s stats are impressive: over 3 billion streams across his music catalog. Still, he downplays his talents. “It’s what I do — make songs. I wouldn’t call it an ability, it’s a hobby [that] just comes to me.”

Yachty credits middle school, where he would “play and make spoofs,” for his humorous approach. That time in his life is also when he first heard Drake. “He’s one of my favorite artists since fifth grade,” says Yachty. “Now he calls me sometimes. It’s really cool.”

To have Drake as a friend is one thing, but getting him on a feature is a feat unto its own. “I mean, he’s the biggest artist in the world so he has to really want to do it,” says Yachty. “ I can’t speak for anybody else but for me, it means everything to have a Drake feature. I’m so thankful and appreciative.”

On “Lil Boat 3,” Yachty has more fire features, including A$AP Rocky, Tyler The Creator, Future, Young Thug, Lil Durk, Lil Keed, DaBaby and Tierra Whack. Draft Day appears on the track and in the video for “Demon Time.” Watch it below.

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Michigan Boy Boat

By Alphonse Pierre

Quality Control / Motown

April 28, 2021

There has never been a bag Lil Yachty won’t shamelessly chase. Since the Atlanta rapper arrived in 2016 with his melodic mixtape Lil Boat , he has been equally known for brand shilling as his music. He hit a two-step with Carly Rae Jepsen in a Target ad . He reworked the lyrics for his grating breakout single “Minnesota” for a Sprite commercial . He devised a cursed Chef Boyardee jingle with Donny Osmond. He might have recorded the worst television theme song of all time. Currently he’s working on a movie based around the card game Uno. It’s a reflection of the current climate, where almost any rapper eligible to appear on the top three lines of a Rolling Loud bill is a brand.

It’s because of all this that I was initially skeptical of his longtime intermingling with the shit-talking characters of Michigan’s thriving street rap scene . Was he using them to make his music cool again? Or was this a genuine connection with a fast-growing movement that has long been underappreciated? Likely it was a bit of both. Songs like last year’s “Flintana” (with the animated Flint rappers RMC Mike , YN Jay , and Louie Ray ) and “Not Regular” (with Detroit’s robot-dancing Sada Baby ) not only revived Yachty as a rapper but also raised the profile of Michigan rap.

Yachty’s new mixtape, Michigan Boy Boat , is an earned celebration of this fruitful relationship. Though it’s important not to position Yachty as Michigan’s rap savior—the music in both Detroit and Flint is so singular that it would have ended up in Atlanta anyway—Yachty has undeniably helped speed up the process. The chemistry Yachty has built with many of the scene’s rappers is real. Yachty sounds comfortable on the posse cut “This That One,” among the patented darkly funny punchlines, grim piano melody, booming drums, and ominous church bells, but he is not the center of attention. He’s more like a host that paves the way for his compelling guests: KrispyLife Kidd beat a dude so bad he thought he got jumped, and YN Jay is selling dope to a customer who has a bald head like Bobby Lashley . Similarly on “Plastic,” Yachty takes a backseat to Eastside Detroit’s Icewear Vezzo and Flint’s Rio Da Yung OG : “My shooter got ADHD, he’ll kill you for a script of Addys/I was finna fuck my bitch mom, but I can hit the granny,” raps Rio, maybe the most unnecesarily batshit consecutive lines on a mixtape full of them.

But the mixtape struggles when the focus shifts to Yachty. He doesn’t have Mike’s commanding voice or Rio’s recklessness, the laid-back swag of Babyface Ray or the out-of-pocket insanity of YN Jay. It’s less noticeable when he’s bouncing off of them, but glaring on solo songs like “Final Form” and “Concrete Goonies,” which are tolerable only because of dynamic beats from mainstays of the scene Helluva and Enrgy. When Yachty invites Swae Lee into this world on “Never Did Coke,” it goes about as badly as when a melodic teenage rapper shows up on a radio freestyle show and they play a DJ Premier beat.

Sprinkled across the 14 tracks are moments where Yachty sounds at home: “How the hell is niggas gangsters graduatin’ from St. John’s?” he asks on “Hybrid,” and on “Dynamic Duo,” he raps “My old bitch was really old, born in ’86,” sending all the ’80s babies into an early mid-life crisis. His best performance of all is on “G.I. Joe,” which coincidentally is the only track on the tape not rooted in the Michigan style.

If you’re already familiar with the state’s street rap movement, Michigan Boy Boat doesn’t add anything new. It’ll be a real success if it leads new fans toward superior modern mixtapes like Babyface Ray’s MIA Season 2 , Rio Da Yung OG’s City on My Back , Drego and Beno ’s Sorry For the Get Off , Los ’ G Shit Vol. 1 , BandGang Lonnie Bands ’ KOD , and more. But for anyone searching for an entry point, it’s a fun introduction to the fast-paced instrumentals, unpredictable flows, and demented punchlines synyonmous with Detroit and Flint.

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How Lil Yachty Became Michigan Boy Boat

Before the release of ‘Michigan Boy Boat,’ Lil Yachty sits for an interview about how his collabs with Michigan artists energized him to grow as a rapper.

Photo by Gunner Stahl

Lil Yachty has been spending a lot of time in Michigan lately.

Midway through one low-budget music video for a song called “Flintana,” he shows up in a parking lot with a crew of up-and-coming rappers from Flint: RMC Mike, YN Jay, and Louie Ray. At the beginning of the clip, there’s a disclaimer that says, “This song was made the night before, therefore nobody knew the lyrics,” and everything about it has the raw, spontaneous feeling of a collaboration that came to life on a whim at 2 a.m. In other words, it’s in a completely different universe from the glossy sheen of a song like “Oprah’s Bank Account.”

As Yachty lowers himself on the concrete and does push-ups at the end of Mike’s verse, you can’t help but wonder how the hell he ended up in a random Flint parking lot with a bunch of underground rappers in the first place. But he does such a good job matching the spirit of the song, context doesn’t really matter here. It’s all energy. After a few quick bars about pussy and a mouth full of gold, Yachty circles back with a couple Snoh Aalegra and Kevin Federline references to punctuate his second verse. And when he’s not rapping, he laughs along with punchlines from Mike, Jay, and Ray, hyping up his collaborators. “They have fun,” he says now. “They talk about all kinds of crazy shit.”

View this video on YouTube

Later, there’s a Lil Yachty sighting at a Detroit studio with Rio Da Yung OG , and he materializes on two more songs with YN Jay. As the year progresses, Yachty’s Michigan collaborations keep popping up online, and each time he tries out self-described “unorthodox” flows, pushing himself to wild new lyrical territory. On all of them, he sounds more energized than we’ve heard him in years. Before long, it’s clear Yachty has become an honorary member of the Michigan rap scene, home to some of the most exciting ( and quotable ) new artists on the planet. 

“They’re mad fucking lyrical in a weird way,” he points out. “The schemes and the cadences and the flows are so unorthodox.”

Yachty says these collaborations have taught him “how to have fun with it” again. He’s having so much fun, in fact, that he decided to make a whole mixtape and call it Michigan Boy Boat . The project will arrive on April 23, and judging by the tags on the announcement Instagram post , it will feature everyone from Veeze to Babyface Ray to Sada Baby to Icewear Vezzo. As Yachty puts it, the project is an opportunity to show love to the scene he’s grown to care about so much.

As the release date nears, the 23-year-old rapper hopped on the phone with Complex to talk about Michigan Boy Boat, three other projects he’s working on, a night in the studio with Freddie Gibbs, and more. The interview, lightly edited for clarity, is below.

How did you first get plugged in with the Michigan rap scene? I’ve always loved Detroit rap. I used to work with Pablo Skywalkin back in 2016. And I always loved Tee Grizzley. “First Day Out” was such an insane song, and I thought he was so lyrical. So I was working with him, and then my best friend Mitch started putting me on to other rappers locally who were on the rise, and I just loved their beats and their rapping schemes. I thought they were so dope. So that’s how I got into it originally.

A lot of people were surprised to see you show up in so many music videos with underground rappers in Flint and Detroit last year. How did the collaborations start happening? I was reaching out to them, bro. I was just coming to them. I wasn’t afraid to show love, and I wanted to work with all of them. So I would just hit them up.

What is it about their music that made you want to work with them? They don’t care. They want to have fun. And it’s funny . They’re mad fucking lyrical in a weird way. The schemes and the cadences and the flows are so unorthodox. And the style of Michigan beats just forced me into this really weird scheme. You’ll see when this mixtape comes out. I just rap really unorthodox on it. A lot of people won’t like it. A lot of people think it’s offbeat.

View this photo on Instagram

Do you think these beats have pushed you to grow as a rapper? Yeah, I learned new schemes and cadences. And I learned to have fun with it. They have fun. They talk about all kinds of crazy shit. 

Michigan Boy Boat is on the way. What made you want to do a full tape with songs like this? I just wanted to show love. That’s it. I just wanted to show love to all of those guys and their talent. And I feel like I rap my best on those types of beats.

You sound really energized lately. I remember a few months ago, you jumped in Cardo’s room on Clubhouse and told everyone how excited you were about a verse you had just written. Yeah. That verse was so fucking crazy. I was sitting on the toilet.

Overall, it seems like you’re having a lot of fun making music right now. Oh, yeah. And I’m about to drop so much shit, it doesn’t make any sense. I’m definitely having fun. 

A couple months ago, you dropped “Hit Bout It” with Kodak Black, which was a crazy moment. What was that experience like?  We didn’t record it in person, but I did take a trip out there to shoot the video. When I recorded the song, I was on my Detroit shit. What happened was, I posted a snippet on my Instagram. And he was originally supposed to do a verse for “Pardon Me.” You know, because he was just pardoned by Donald Trump. Then he was like, “Man, I ain’t going to lie. I really want to get on this.” I was super excited, and we made it happen.

In the behind-the-scenes video, it looked like you guys have a tight bond together. What’s your relationship like, and how did that all go down? I don’t know how or why. It just kinda happened. I hit him when he was in jail, and I wanted to show support and that I was fucking with him. And he would call me every now and then. We’d chop it up and just talk. I think he really supported that and respected that. And when he got out, it was just love.

Speaking of collaborations, you were just tweeting about Freddie Gibbs assembling the Avengers for his next album. Yeah, I was with him last night. I put him on some Detroit shit. [Laughs.]

How did you guys link up? After I tweeted that, he DM’d me, like, “Let’s link.” And I was out here and I pulled right the fuck up.

What was that session like? I was super excited. He’s really fire. He’s like a legend. He was super cool. He’s like a gangster. He was super dope, and he’s older. The session was really chill. I didn’t stay long, unfortunately, because I had to go to a session with Mac DeMarco, so I did the song and left. But it was dope as fuck. He’s funny as shit.

You recently tweeted , “I be sittin back watching y’all assumptions on situations and y’all be so off. The internet just be making up shit.” Do you think people have misconceptions about you at this point? What do people get wrong? Yeah, [some people] think I’m gay as fuck. But I have a beautiful girlfriend. And before her, I had plenty of bitches. You know? So that’s a misconception. But I don’t give a fuck.

You’ve been writing songs for other artists a little lately, like “Act Up” for City Girls, which I think opened some people’s minds to how talented you really are. Is that part of the appeal? I love gaining my respect. 

As a songwriter for other artists, you have to put yourself in someone else’s point of view, and you’ve pulled it off really well so far. Why do you think it’s come naturally for you? Honestly, I was just bored, bro. One day I was in the studio, bored as fuck. And I was like, “Let me see if I can do this.” I did it.

Is that something you want to do more? I’ve done it a few times. I’ve done it. I stopped speaking on it.

I see. I was going to ask if you’d explore that more and ever write songs for pop artists or anything. Yeah, I’ve done some shit. I don’t want to get into it, but I’ve done some shit.

{ "id": 133906885 } “Just listen to the f*cking bars because I promise I’m rapping my f*cking a** off.”

I know you’ve been in the studio with Taz Taylor and the Internet Money guys. Can you talk about that? We’re doing an album. I’m about to go see Taz right now. He’s a fucking king. He’s a fucking GOAT. I have respect for him, 100%.

What have the sessions been like so far? I’ve been in LA three days, and we’ve already made 24 songs. We’re working hard, bro. It’s fun. It’s melodic. It’s fully melodic.

Oh, shit. So a totally different sound from this next Michigan Boy Boat project… Yeah, I got projects, man. I’ve got my project with Internet Money. I’m doing my project with Lil Tecca. I got my project with Working On Dying. And then I’ll start my album fourth quarter of the year.

So there’s lots of shit going on. I’m dropping a shit ton this year.

What made you want to make a bunch of different projects that show all your different styles, instead of just holding off and doing one big album? It didn’t start off that way. It honestly started off with me just fucking with all these guys that I fuck with. And they all love me for different things. Taz, he wanted to bring out my melodic side. You know, with Working On Dying, it’s just all types of heat.

Before you go, I wanted to ask about cryptocurrency. You created your YachtyCoin and then made an NFT. And I know you were an early investor in Dogecoin and SafeMoon and all this shit. How did you get into all of this? Well, my manager put me onto the whole YachtyCoin thing. This year and last year, I just took it and ran with it.

There are stories of people who invested early making ridiculous amounts of money. I know you were early, too. Have you seen crazy profits already? Oh, yeah. Ohhhh yeah . Mm-hmm. 

What should people know before they press play on Michigan Boy Boat when it drops? Just listen to the fucking bars because I promise I’m rapping my fucking ass off.

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The dark side of the boat: reviewing Lil Yachty’s Pink Floyd-inspired album

The Atlanta rapper’s ambitious ‘Let’s Start Here’ is exciting

Courtesy of Complex

“Let’s Start Here” takes inspiration from Pink Floyd.

Tabitha Cahan , Contributing Writer January 30, 2023

As a music aficionado, keeping up with Pitchfork is practically my religion. What I was not expecting on my Pitchfork feed, however, was a promotion announcing “Let’s Start Here,” Lil Yachty’s psychedelic rock album. Now this piqued my interest. 

Lil Yachty, or Lil Boat, as his fans refer to him, is an Atlanta-based rapper whose discography is, quite frankly, forgettable. His trademark over-autotuned vocals are outshone by rap powerhouse Travis Scott, and his instrumentals have rarely been described as inventive. With the exception of his TikTok-famous hit “Poland,” I couldn’t name a single one of his songs. 

Though Lil Yachty is categorized as a rapper, with his musical career being launched within the hip-hop genre, his fifth studio album, “Let’s Start Here,” is decidedly not rap. Best defined as a psychedelic rock album, “Let’s Start Here” is unrecognizable in comparison to Lil Yachty’s previous hits such as “Poland” or “One Night.” Taking the leap to enter a new genre that is relatively underused in terms of mainstream music is risky, but like Radiohead’s electronic album “Kid A,” this genre experimentation really paid off.

Could this be Lil Yachty’s “Kid A” ? To Radiohead fans everywhere, let me explain. No, I am not likening Lil Yachty’s previous discography to Radiohead — that would be preposterous. Radiohead is many things, and forgettable is not one of them. What I am more interested in is Radiohead and Lil Yachty’s refusal to be defined. I believe that “Let’s Start Here” is Lil Yachty’s rebellion against the confines of rap.  

Radiohead, pre- “Kid A,” was defined as a 90s Britpop band, likened to that of U2, Oasis, Blur, etc. “Kid A,” however, blew that definition completely out of the water. It was a dystopian electronic album, filled with soundscapes and entirely different instrumentation. As Pitchfork writer Brent DiCrescenzo aptly described it, ‘Kid A’ makes rock and roll childish.” It was one of the most shocking turns in their discography.

“Let’s Start Here,” executively produced by SadPony, was released on Jan. 27, 2023. Contributors and features include MGMT’s Benjamin Goldwasser, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Jacob Portrait, Alex G, Mac DeMarco, Wimberly, Justin Raisen, Teezo Touchdown, Daniel Caesar, Fousheé, Diana Gordon, Magdalena Bay, Justine Skye and Nick Hakim. This lineup is completely unexpected but exciting nonetheless. 

In this psychedelic rock odyssey, Lil Yachty’s inspiration of Pink Floyd definitely shines through. Many songs on the album also sound similar to Tame Impala or even Childish Gambino’s “Awaken, My Love!” In this equally shocking left turn, Lil Yachty is redefining the creative limits of his music. 

The opener “the BLACK seminole.” beautifully exemplifies his Pink Floyd inspiration. This song feels like a direct homage to “Dark Side of the Moon.” Pieces of the song seem to be drawn from “Breathe (In The Air),” “The Great Gig in the Sky” and even earlier works like “Pigs (Three Different Ones).” Best described as a cosmic rock expedition, the track is a seven-minute journey into the world he has created. The instrumentals are transcendent — complete with a guitar solo, of course. Similar to “Everything In Its Right Place” from “Kid A,” it sets the stage for the songs to follow. 

The third track on the album, “running out of time,” is sung in part by Justine Skye and feels poppy and bright. The bassline is upbeat and funky, complementing the guitar riffs and swirling synths. Lil Yachty sings romantically, inviting the listener to stay up all night with him. I mean, if this is the soundtrack, I’m game. 

“THE zone~” also features Justine Skye, but it feels much more like the psychedelic powerhouse Tame Impala than the previous. Between the in strumentation and the hyperbolic lyrics “I’m so far gone,” this one truly feels like an acid trip.

On a more lighthearted track, Diana Gordon is the main singer on “drive ME crazy!”, and i t’s pure bliss. The instrumental is more minimalist in the beginning, honing in on Gordon’s voice. Toward the end of the track, there is a synth breakdown that cuts the song into half time, and we hear Lil Yachty rapping for the first and only time in the album. The string ending neatly ties the song up in a little bow.

In another track that sounds straight off a Tame Impala record, “sHouLd i B?” transitions perfectly into “The Alchemist.” The punchy drums and modulated synth make for two effervescent tracks. The breakdown in “The Alchemist” is accented nicely by Fousheé hitting her highest register.

The final track “REACH THE SUNSHINE.” sounds eerily reminiscent of Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song.” “Pyramid Song” was originally intended as a track for “Kid A” before it was on “Amnesiac,” an album composed mostly of the b-sides of “Kid A.” The first line of “REACH THE SUNSHINE.” sung by Daniel Caesar, “Staring in the mirror, and what do I see / A three-eyed man staring back at me” has a flow comparable to Radiohead’s “I jumped in the river and what did I see? / Black eyed angels swam with me.” 

It is equally sparse in terms of instrumentation, until it reaches a crescendo about two and a half minutes into the song (almost the same time stamp as “Pyramid Song,” might I add). The crescendo transports the listener to the same pocket of the universe with a deep, synth-fueled surge. This feels more sinister than the Radiohead track — the anti-chorus is peppered with evil laughs rather than Thom Yorke’s signature croon. This track is Lil Yachty reaching his full potential. It is ethereal and otherworldly. The cacophony of the anti-chorus reaches new heights, and it’s exciting to hear. 

Whether my argument resonates with you or not, it is always exciting to see artists take risks. One cannot deny how ambitious of a move this is, especially given the constraints of being a trap artist. In the same vein as Radiohead, throughout his rise to fame, Lil Yachty has been mainstream. “Let’s Start Here” and “Kid A” show that an artist can completely change their trajectory. In an age with increasing amounts of cash-grab, radio-friendly drivel, albums like this give me faith in the future of music.  

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Joey • Feb 26, 2023 at 6:01 pm

Sophistication encapsulated in a article

Alexandra Falk • Feb 23, 2023 at 7:49 pm

I got into Wake Forest

Adam • Feb 1, 2023 at 11:10 am

Going to listen now

Preston • Jan 31, 2023 at 9:55 pm

Pigs was from Animals, which is not an earlier work than Dark Side of the Moon

G Lampa • May 15, 2023 at 12:20 pm

Bullseye. A little homework goes a long way. First track actually does harken back to pre-Dark Side stuff; specifically “Childhood’s End” 1972.

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Lil Yachty Seemingly Shades Kendrick Lamar Over Infidelity Following Drake Diss

Lil Yachty has appeared to throw shade at Kendrick Lamar following his blistering Drake diss song “Euphoria.”

Following the track’s release on Tuesday (April 30), Lil Boat — who was mentioned on the song and has a close relationship with the 6 God — liked a post on X (formerly Twitter) rehashing Kendrick’s past infidelity.

“So who was raising your child while you were out cheating on your wife with white women? @kendricklamar,” the post read, referencing K. Dot’s attack on Drake for allegedly being an absentee father.

“Why would I call around tryna get dirt on n-ggas? Y’all think all my life is rap?/ That’s ho shit, I got a son to raise, but I can see you don’t know nothin’ ’bout that,” he taunted on the track.

After eagle-eyed fans clocked his like, Lil Yachty pleaded his innocence, writing: “Shit was an accident lmao.”

When a user told him it’s “too late buddy” and posted a video of a man saying: “There’s no way out of this one, you’re done,” Yachty replied with laughing emojis.

Shit was an accident lmao https://t.co/0cF77iblW0 — CONCRETE BOY BOAT^ (@lilyachty) May 1, 2024

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 https://t.co/zXejRz8l3O — CONCRETE BOY BOAT^ (@lilyachty) May 1, 2024

Kendrick Lamar admitted to cheating on his longtime partner Whitney Alford , with whom he shares two children, on the song “Mother I Sober” from his 2022 album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers .

“I was never high, I was never drunk, never out my mind/ I need control, they handed me some smoke, but still I declined/ I did it sober, sittin’ with myself, I went through all emotions/ No dependents — except for one, let me bring you closer,” he confessed.

He continued: “Intoxicated, there’s a lustful nature that I failed to mention/ Insecurities that I project, sleepin’ with other women/ Whitney’s hurt, the pure soul I know, I found her in the kitchen/ Askin’ God, ‘Where did I lose myself? And can it be forgiven?”

Elsewhere on the album, Kendrick admitted to sleeping with a white woman while on tour in Europe.

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“ Next time I fucked a white bitch was out in Copenhagen/​ ‘ good kid, m.A.A.d city tour ,’ I flourished on them stages/ Whitney asked did I have a problem, I said, ‘I might be racist’/ Ancestors watchin’ me fuck was like retaliation ,” he rapped on “Worldwide Steppers.”

As for “Euphoria,” among the many shots aimed at Drake is the suggestion that Lil Yachty is responsible for some of the rap star’s recent output.

“I’m allergic to the lame shit, only you like bein’ famous/ Yachty can’t give you no swag neither, I don’t give a fuck ’bout who you hang with,” he raps.

Drake and Yachty have become close collaborators in recent years, teaming up on “Another Late Night” from the former’s 2023 album For All the Dogs .

The Atlanta native also co-produced the songs “What Would Pluto Do,” “Away From Home,” “Polar Opposites,” “Red Button” and “The Shoe Fits,” as well as several cuts on Her Loss , Drizzy’s joint project with 21 Savage .

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Lil yachty claims him liking a shady tweet about kendrick after “euphoria” was “an accident”.

Fans recalled Kendrick admitting he had sex with a white woman on the 'Good Kid, M.A.A.D City' tour.

By Armon Sadler

Armon Sadler

Hip-Hop Reporter

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Accidents happen! Lil Yachty claims that he did not intend to link a tweet where a Drake fan account called out Kendrick Lamar for infidelity.

The Compton, Calif., rapper released his Drake-targeted diss record “ Euphoria ” on Tuesday (April 30) and called out the Toronto superstar for being a “deadbeat” father. Naturally, fans of the “Rich Baby Daddy” rapper weren’t pleased with the claim and recalled an admission he made on his 2022 album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers .

On the song “Worldwide Steppers,” he rapped, “The first time I f**ked a white b**ch, I was sixteen at the Palisades, fumblin’ my grades,” and “Next time I f**ked a white b**ch, was out in Copenhagen/ Good Kid, M.A.A.D City tour, I flourished on them stages.” He mentioned a conversation he had with his wife, Whitney Alford, about the situation as well: “Whitney asked did I have a problem/ I said, ‘I might be racist’/ Ancestors watchin’ me f**k was like retaliation.”

Ice-T Says He's More "Focused On His Bag" Than The Rap Beef Between Drake And Kendrick Lamar

A Drake fan account posted a Genius lyric card from Kendrick Lamar’s “Euphoria” where he raps, “Y’all think all of my life is rap?/ That’s h** sh*t, I got a son to raise, but I can see you know nothin’ bout that.” In the caption, they asked, “So who was raising your child while you were out cheating on your wife with white women? @kendricklamar.”

These days, a large part of being a Hip-Hop fan is perusing artists’ social media activity. So, unsurprisingly, a music account discovered that Lil Yachty liked the tweet alluding to K. Dot’s infidelity. The act was perceived as him subtly going to bat for the Toronto superstar, with whom he has collaborated and developed a strong friendship over the last few years. Beyond that, Yachty himself was mentioned in “Euphoria” with the lines: “I’m allergic to the lame sh*t, only you like bein’ famous/ Yachty can’t give you no swag neither, I don’t give a f**k ’bout who you hang with.”

so who was raising your child while you were out cheating on your wife with white women? @kendricklamar pic.twitter.com/voR80vQ99p — أ (@drizzyys) April 30, 2024

Shit was an accident lmao https://t.co/0cF77iblW0 — CONCRETE BOY BOAT^ (@lilyachty) May 1, 2024

???????? https://t.co/zXejRz8l3O — CONCRETE BOY BOAT^ (@lilyachty) May 1, 2024

“Euphoria” was Kendrick Lamar’s response to Drake’s one-two punch of “ Push Ups ” and the now-deleted “ Taylor Made Freestyle ,” the latter of which featured modulated vocals from Tupac and Snoop Dogg. K. Dot kicked off this chapter of his feud with his former collaborator on Future and Metro Boomin’s “ Like That ” at the end of March.

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