The YBN collective hit hip-hop’s underbelly like a whirlwind. Yet, just like any storm, it soon came to pass leaving the former group’s leader, YBN Nahmir, alone to pick up the pieces.
During a recent interview with No Jumper, Nahmir explains how egos and outside forces tore the group apart.
“The old niggas in the background, you gotta remember, it’s always somebody that’ll come around and fill your head up and fuck it over,” Nahmir said to host Adam22. “That’s what happened. It’ll be old people or somebody else that’ll tell you you better than them, they don’t give a fuck about you, all that shit. And that filled up all our heads. Not just me, not just Jay, not Cordae, but other YBN members, too.”
He added, “That’s how you take advantage of a young kid. He’s 17, 18, you’re not really thinking. We just came out of nothing, from bullshit. When you know how to speak and when you got money, you know how to do some shit and you’re old as fuck, you know how to take advantage of somebody, you know how to manipulate a kid. That’s what they did to all of us.”
The YBN camp came to its formal end when the group’s most acclaimed member, Cordae, decided to drop YBN from his moniker in August 2020. This followed Nahmir revealing that neither Cordae nor Almighty Jay associated with him anymore.
Although they were moving as a collective—dropping their 2018 debut mixtape, YBN: The Mixtape, Nahmir admitted to No Jumper that he wanted them all to have their respective careers under the YBN banner. This invited people like J Prince and other figures into the camp. Per Nahmir, this inflated egos and ruined the entire movement.
“It’s always going to be something with a group,” Nahmir said after insisting that he doesn’t have beef with any former YBN members. “It be hella shit in the background, but at the end of the day we’re all brothers.”
Watch Nahmir’s full appearance on No Jumper above.
