He’s in the headlines, and it’s not for reasons that are good…

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Will Rivitz: Man, of all times to cover NBA YoungBoy, huh? Two days ago, I might have mentioned the conflict between hip-hop as pure entertainment and hip-hop as a reflection of what its artists are actually doing in the context of YoungBoy’s “I’ma pull up in style, we gon’ do a drive-by in the Wraith/I’ma take it to trial, pray to Lord I beat the case” in relation to the ten-year sentence he received as punishment for a drive-by two years ago; I might have tried to discuss the weirdness of what happens when members of a generation raised on the increasingly violent rap of the late 1990s and early 2000s begin to blur the distinction between the lives of which they tell and the lives they actually lead. Now, though, we know that NBA YoungBoy has been arrested on a slew of deeply troubling charges, including kidnapping and assault, and we have alleged footage of NBA YoungBoy body-slamming his girlfriend in a Georgia hotel. If what we’re told is true, I no longer think it’s worth affording this piece of shit the critical capacity most of his contemporaries are worth.
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Alfred Soto: A peek into the mind of a YoungSleazeball: if he’s gonna be this surly and misanthropic, he better not come outside all. A strong hook, with lazily malevolent verses. 
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Katie Gill: It’s a bit too short, a bit too repetitive, and a bit too predictable with the lyrics, but NBA YoungBoy makes the best out of what he’s got. At least the beat’s catchy.
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Ryo Miyauchi: NBA Youngboy’s melodic style suits his songs about a bond between family or a loyal girlfriend than paranoia. In this time in rap where triple-time flows are hit with one detached monotone, though, it’s hard to find a rapper better than Youngboy that delivers a tight rap song with a lively voice and a playful meter.
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Jonathan Bradley: “Outside Today” is, on its surface, a song about fame as a marker of success: YoungBoy only has to leave the house to get attention. But there’s a lot of melancholy between the new watches and expensive cars, and his wail on the hook matches the tension in his voice on the verses and the numbed, dissociative piano line swimming beneath the beat. This ends up a song of surveillance: from the law, from friends, from women, from god, from an ever-present atmosphere of violence. Before reaching the two minute mark, he says it directly: “Face every problem all by my lonely.” He doesn’t go on for much longer after that.
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Julian Axelrod: YoungBoy is one of those rappers whose backstory interests me than his actual songs. Last year’s Fader profile showed a young man forced to reckon with the dangers of being newly rich and famous on the streets of his hometown. Viewed through this lens, “Outside Today” takes on a sinister air: One minute he’s buying tigers and mansions for his children, the next he’s strapped in his house trying to keep his empire standing. But viewed on its own merits, it feels flat. His brittle yelp suggests Kevin Gates by way of Young Thug, without the former’s everyman detail or the latter’s melodic daring. I want to love YoungBoy on his own merits, not because I’m inserting my own narrative.
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Micha Cavaseno: “Outside Today” touches at a weariness that someone like YoungBoy, arguably one of the biggest rappers to emerge out of Baton Rouge since Kevin Gates, should not possess for someone still pushing out of their teens. In the past few years alone, YoungBoy Never Broke Again (or NBA Youngboy or whatever spin on his rap name Atlantic wants to waste our time with to appease copyright holders) has provided a string of songs that communicate not only a latent aggression but a spiritual malaise that only undermines the tragedy that in 2018 a teenage boy can already project the kind of sorrow the average person would feel humiliated to admit to suffering. The obvious themes of paranoia are eloquated so well that even the fact that most of the bars are boasts reveals the desire to ward away anyone who hears a word. How somber a note that while the vermillion multitudes of SoundCloud rap with its cliched nihilism as fashion attracts all the jaw-jacking of concerned adults, it’s the kids who sound like they have everything and nothing to lose who often fall outside of our care.
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