Lil Yachty press photo
Everybody hates Lil Yachty. Well, apparently everyone who doesn’t fall in the scope of being a millennial. 19-year-old Atlanta rapper Miles McCollum is perhaps one of the most intensely polarising figures rap music has seen since Soulja Boy’s controversial run in 2007. Just last month, The Breakfast Show co-host Charlamagne Tha God told Yachty that he’s the posterchild for wack rappers. Last year, he was savaged by Hot 97’s Ebro and an army of old-heads after mentioning he probably couldn’t name five songs by 2Pac or the Notorious B.I.G in a Billboard interview. He even daringly added an exclamation point after calling the latter overrated in a video for Pitchfork.
While he later made things right with Ebro on his Beats 1 show and revealed he’d delved into Biggie’s catalogue after the fact, his behavior left a sour taste in the mouth of already bitter rap purists. That he dislikes being called a “rapper” and preferring the term “brand” might make it worse for that crowd, and his decision to classify himself as “bubblegum trap” might not work in his favour either. But that criticism hasn’t stopped him. Two widely successful mixtapes in, a massive song of the summer under his belt in his top five Billboard charting, Grammy-nominated collaboration with D.R.A.M called “Broccoli”, and it's time for Yachty to drop his first real full-length.
Discussing the project with him over the phone, Yachty says that he sees Teenage Emotions as his first real album – he’s had projects before, but this is the first he’s labeled as an album. With streaming beginning to fragment the significance of the traditional album, it’s interesting that the young rapper has put so much emphasis on this piece of work being labeled that way. At 21 tracks long, it’s just one song short of matching Drake’s latest effort More Life, which some theorise that the chart-topping rapper called a “playlist” to circumvent the traditional criticism of an album being too long.
What Yachty says he’s tried to give us are 21 tracks that are etched with positivity – but that extends beyond the album and into his everyday life. “Any post I do on social media, any song, anything in general – I just try to promote positivity, because I felt like there's not enough positivity going around in the world,” he says. The cover of the album is intended to celebrate diversity, and features people of all walks of life being comfortable in themselves–two men kissing, a woman with vitiligo, another man with albinism, among others. It’s perhaps a marker of where we are in 2017 that it’s really not particularly provocative – unless you’re someone who’s using a Pepe the Frog meme as an avatar.
Most of Yachty’s message, he believes, was sent with that cover. But he says the album’s content itself doesn’t necessarily have a message – instead it’s designed to convey a vibe. “It’s basically just like mood music almost – music for your everyday mood as a teenager, your everyday life,” he says. Speaking on the album in the past, it was an attempt to represent the varying parts of a teenager’s life, from heartbreaks to happiness. The new-wave tinged “Bring It Back” then seems a bizarre choice to push as an intended hit, when it might be alienating for his core demographic – especially when they were probably born in the early 2000s.
But that eighties influence seems to have come second hand, while shooting the music video for his cover of Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two” with Carly Rae Jepsen, a sponsored piece for Target that premiered during the 59th Annual Grammy Awards. On the set, Yachty heard L.A. singer-songwriter Empress Of crooning on a Blood Orange song called “Best To You”, from his 2016 project Freetown Sound. “That song, it was really my inspiration – I called my producer and I was like ‘I love this song, can I have something with this vibe?’” he says. It’s ambitious, but somewhat reminiscent of Lil’ Wayne’s foray into rock with his album Rebirth – a respectable experiment, but mostly ham-fisted in its execution.
In contrast, the album’s absolute highlight is the K-Swisha produced “Priorities”, which sees Yachty essentially flexing about how fucked his own actually are – how he’ll cheat on a loyal girl to mess with “some sluts”, and always put partying and rapping over anything else. Refrains of “fuck school, and fuck the rules” naturally follow – it’s the exact thing you’d expect from an album called Teenage Emotions, and it’s likely to be the sleeper hit.
When I tell Yachty how much I like the track, he’s legitimately excited: “I played my album for a lot of people and they never say anything about that song, but that song is super turnt,” he says. It’s a song he said was made for anyone who’s ever rebelled against the norm: “I made a song for kids, someone who hates school, has to go to school and they'd rather do something bad,” he explains. “They'd rather go to a party than do their homework, you know, they just got their priorities messed up.” It’s a sentiment that you don’t have to be a teenager to get at all – it’s just Yachty at his purest, talking about the feelings he knows best.
Yachty felt it was important to showcase himself on Teenage Emotions, keeping the features list fairly minimal: “most of the songs are just me, ‘cause it's really just for my real fans – giving them something to listen to,” he says. It’d been a long time since he’d officially released any solo work, and while leaks kept his fans sated until now, he knew that he had to give them a large body of work that was all him.
Still, as much as he’s given of himself, Yachty says that a lot of the subject matter is fictional, and that he hadn’t really made a conscious effort to pour too many of his own feelings and experiences into the project. But when pressed on how much of the more emotional tracks were autobiographical, he admits the reality that bled into a few. “I'm not gonna lie, maybe one or two,” he says. “A lot of them are just like different emotions, so they're just for my fans who are going through it.”
And while it's sure to be an outlet for his listeners, it’s hard to forget that the album is a branding exercise too. Yachty has a vision that goes much further than bouncing back to the game every year with a few new tunes. That Target ad, a partnership with Sprite and resulting commercial with LeBron James, and his most recent glow up being appointed Nautica’s creative designer are not random occurrences – they’re very calculated moves.
It’s what makes him different from all the other supposed voices for youth that made a couple million and then disappeared into obscurity: “I just have a mindset, like a futuristic mindset. I set goals and I know what I want in life,” Yachty says. What he sees as his ultimate aim is surprising, but makes sense: “One of my biggest goals, is I just really want to become an actor,” he says. While he’s mentioned the idea in passing before, there’s a real conviction in the way he says this - knowing his hustle hasn’t failed him so far, it's hard to imagine him not making it a reality.
But for now, the focus is the music. And looking towards the future, Yachty expounds on his hope to do more work with his contemporaries: “my next project's gonna have more collaborative songs and it'll just be more friendly,” he says. Chance The Rapper is an obvious choice to work with, as someone he’s commended for breaking down barriers for independent artists in the past with his Grammy win, and contributed a star-making feature for on Coloring Book’s “Mixtape”. So does he think that we’ll we see the two back in the studio sometime soon? “I hope so, I love Chance,” Yachty says warmly.
Another artist he has huge admiration for, having appeared as a model in his Yeezy Season 3 Show, is Kanye West. Yachty was caught in the studio with the rapper last year – knowing Ye works so collaboratively on his own projects, it was anyone’s guess as to what his contributions might have been. “I was working on music for Cruel Winter,” he reveals tentatively. The existence of the long-rumoured and hotly anticipated sequel to G.O.O.D Music’s compilation Cruel Summer has more recently been hinted at by Cy-Hi Da Prince and Travis Scott, but there hasn’t been too much discussion beyond the inner circle. It’s a good look for an up-and-comer like Yachty to be involved – that’s why he’s hopeful that the work he put in makes the final version. “I put a verse down. A couple of them. I hope they make it, but I did a couple verses,” he says.
As much respect as some of the biggest names in rap clearly have for him, he’s still got some convincing to do with those that consider themselves “real” hip-hop heads. His appearance on Complex’s Everyday Struggle saw rap O.G. Joe Budden calling him out for not knowing the details of his deal, what he wanted from hip-hop, and most bizarrely, for expressing the fact that he’s happy all the time, which Budden seemingly found disingenuous. But Yachty understands that he can’t convert atheists into believers. “One thing about life man, you can't make someone feel any type of way. If that's how they feel, that's how they feel,” he says resignedly.
It has to be respected that Yachty so often tries to fix his perceived wrongdoings though. He acknowledged that he spoke hastily on the 2Pac and Biggie situation, and clarified his knowledge of his deal on Twitter soon after the discussion with Budden. It’s a grown man’s approach that’s sure to take the 19-year-old much further than some of his direct contemporaries. “When I feel like there's conflict I like to address it – that's my whole reason for going on that show,” he says. It’s clear that Budden picked up on the maturity of the rapper, as there appears to be a mutual respect between them: “I know for a fact there is”, Yachty says.
Early on in our interview over the phone, there’s a lot of muffled chatter in the background from what I assume is his Sailing Team crew, so much so that Yachty stops talking mid-way through answering a question. “Ayo, be quiet, be quiet,” he says firmly. “Sorry about that,” he adds, continuing with his response. It’s markedly professional, and not what you expect from a rapper, let alone someone his age.
It’s indicative of the fact that regardless of what you think of him, Yachty has a genuine respect for the process, and an acute awareness of his responsibilities as a prominent figure in hip-hop that many have simply failed to see. Look closer, and you’ll find a 19-year-old who makes mistakes, and then takes the time to make himself better. Feel free to say that you can’t relate to his music, but it's hard to deny – we've all been Lil Yachty at some point in our lives.
