Lil Yachty

One Liner:  That mumble rapper with the red braids

Wikipedia Genre: Hip hop, trap, pop rap, mumble rap, psychedelic rock

Home: Atlanta

Poster Position: 2 (4) 
Both Weekends.
Friday.

Thoughts:  I reviewed one of his albums one time.  I didn't love it.

"Lil Yachty - Lil Boat 2.  Why do I do this shit to myself?  I mean, I know this album is going to suck.  Like, everyone knows this album is going to suck.  Yachty himself probably knows this.  He just wants it up on Spotify so that he can make his $20 jillion dollars and get another platinum album.  Somehow the last song on this thing is the top streamer at 9.1 million streams.  That is either 9.1 million idiots or a bunch of people streaming some "Worst New Rap" playlist who had to suffer through this.

While searching for that video, I also saw this article from Genius saying that this was going to be the runaway hit from this album.  Not good.  Boring brags without any interesting bits.  You do not need to go listen to this album."

I'm just not a fan, at all, of this style of rapping.  All the Soundcloud/mumblecore type rappers that have popped up in the last few years, they all just miss me entirely.  I know this is some old man shaking his cane at the cloud stuff, but I just don't understand what he is saying, and when I take the time to look it up and read it, it is still just bad.  And he's off the beat.  And it is even more repetitive than other rap.  And the beats are usually really boring and plain, like just dinky little Casio scribbles.  Ugh.  I just listened to his current top song while I read the lyrics and I just do. not. get. it.

But hold on.  The song I am listening to rips off Pink Floyd really hard?  What is going on right now?  Let's back up and dive in to this dude.  Maybe I am being too harsh based on his popular tracks.

Miles Parks McCollum (sounds like the next Spiderman name) first popped up on the Internet with some raps in 2015.  He was still a teenager.  Born in Mableton, GA, and started college at Alabama State before dropping out to pursue music full-time.  He moved to New York City (instead of Atlanta?  That seems weird) to make it happen.  He had a minor Soundcloud hit or two, but then hit the big time with his feature in DRAM's song "Broccoli," which is a super fun song.  He was also on Kyle's "iSpy," another ex-ACL artist!

His debut studio album came out in 2017 - Teenage Emotions.  It is one of those brutally long rap things - 21 tracks and over an hour.  The top song features Migos and I cannot tell the difference between this and a regular Migos track.  Okay, I actually like this beat, but deeply garbage lyrics.  93.4 million streams.

Just rapping peekaboo with peekaboo for like straight minutes.  I know I have talked before about how Migos never used to actually write rhymes, they'd just say stupid things over a beat until one of them was like "FIREEEE" and that would be the lyric.  Yep, that checks out here as well.

After that was Lil Boat 2 (review up above), 2018's Nuthin' 2 Prove, 2020's Lil Boat 3 and Lil Boat 3.5, 2021's Michigan Boy Boat (super low streams on that one, and a weird name!), and then 2023's Let's Start Here.  During those releases, a few songs popped big time, but most of them just farted along with like 2 million or 4 million streams.  People definitely listen to this dude as a singles artist, and not by jamming the whole album in a row.  Part of that is likely because he became a big TikTok personality around 2020.  The biggest of all of those was from the 2018 disc, and in fact his most streamed song overall, "Yacht Club" featuring Juice WRLD with 259.8 million streams.

Terrible song.  Not sure which one is rapping at any given time, but just a generic beat and lyrics that sound like they spent 4 minutes putting them together.  "damn young juice world  boy you reckless, and I feel you until I get her naked."  You really killed it with bar, buddy.  I feel like my life just changed!

And the new album just takes the weird and turns it up to 11.  That is the album that features the song I said sounds like Pink Floyd - "the BLACK seminole."  I recall reading a Rolling Stone article about the album and its massive detour from his normal sound, and that definitely is true.  One of those moments where he was quoted as saying something to the effect of - I want to be a serious artist, not just a mumble rapper - and so he threw down a watered-down Tame Impala album with some Outkast-style spoken bits, guitar meandering, and some weird R&B flair.  The top track though is "drive ME crazy!" with 38.2 million streams.

Huh.  A generic 70's throwback summer jam sort of thing is the top track?  I guess it turns into a disjointed rap at the end over a bad Impala dupe, but what a mess.

More recently, he's been sued in a class action lawsuit and by the Securities and Exchange Commission for his involvement with a cryptocurrency company called SafeMoon and another called Tronix.  He settled the SEC claim for $400k without admitting liability.

I asked my daughters - 15 and 12 - about him last night, curious what the younger generation thinks.  15 year old agreed that he was lame, but for her and her friends, he's the best thing they have a chance to enjoy at the Festival because they want fun rappers to mosh along with.  The only songs of his she likes are actually the two early tracks that aren't even his - DRAM's and Kyle's.  Which is funny.  I wonder if he would even play those...  12 year old actually brought up the single that he put out before this new weird album, which impressed me a little bit.  She didn't say she liked it - she was like "you can't even understand what he's saying it is all messy" - but the fact that she immediately knew a relatively recent track was impressive to me.

Super not doing this one.  Y'all have fun.