NBA YoungBoy has the enviable position of being one of the leaders of Hip-Hop’s current youth movement and has the supportive fan base to prove it. However, the Louisiana rapper renounced the violent lyrics within his past music as he is reportedly soon to embrace Mormonism.
NBA YoungBoy was the centerpiece of a revealing profile piece in Billboard where his rise to fame as an artist and his growth as a man is examined at length. YoungBoy’s incredibly supportive fanbase keeps the rapper’s name in the music conversation despite being on house arrest in the snowy hills of Utah. What stood out immediately is that YoungBoy is now wedded to his girlfriend, Jazlyn Mychelle, and together have two little ones, the youngest among the rapper’s 10 children.
It is fair to note that YoungBoy fell into the pattern of many other street rappers with violent boasts both in song and within the confines of social media, but he’s turning his back on those moments as he slowly embraces the idea of becoming a Mormon.
From Billboard:
The past few months of YoungBoy songs are full of curious Utah-isms, like the Book of Mormon passage that opens his video for “Hi Haters” — “Now, as my mind caught hold upon this thought, I cried within my heart: O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me, who am in the gall of bitterness, and am encircled about by the everlasting chains of death” — or a recent line mentioning missionaries visiting his home. “I’m surprised they didn’t come in the process of this [interview],” he says when I ask about the latter reference. The first time the Mormon missionaries appeared on his doorstep, weeks ago, YoungBoy instinctively sent them away. Then he had second thoughts: “I wanted help very badly. I needed a friend. And it hit me.”
What comes across the piece is that NBA YoungBoy has changed for the better but the scars of his past, the things he witnessed as a youth, and the crippling paranoia he still suffers from still have a prominent place in his life. But there is beauty in learning more about the rapper beyond his boasts and threats of his past musical output.
Read the full profile by following this link.
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Photo: Gary Miller / Getty