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Five years ago, award-winning electronic music DJ-producer Jesse Rose and hit songwriter-producer Jesse Rogg decided to launch a global agency to represent creative directors. “We just realized that there was no structure to the world of creative direction,” says Rogg. Having previously worked well in the studio together, Rose says they figured they would work just as well as business partners and, in 2018, formed the Original Creative Agency.
Today, OCA represents over 50 creative directors — or “architects,” as Rose and Rogg say — with clients including Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Christina Aguilera, Tame Impala and Steve Lacy. And while the agency’s creatives work across mediums from music videos to styling to album art, looking at the year ahead, the pair predicts the live space will become a much bigger part of business. “Now people are coming to us and asking us to produce their tours, starting from the creative,” says Rose. “Which makes sense because our job is to make a story for a show.”
The two are confident that storytelling — both on and offstage — will be key to 2023’s most successful treks. Rose recalls speaking with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker ahead of the band’s Slow Rush tour, initially planned in 2020, about how to make the outing feel fresh in 2022. Their solution was to build an entire campaign around the tour. Creative director Ryder Ripps came up with the idea for Rushium, a fictitious pharmaceutical company pushing “rush pills” that appeared on posters, merchandise and the sides of trucks. As for Lamar, the pair praises the way his 2022 Glastonbury headlining set (creative-directed by Mike Carson, along with Lamar and Dave Free) “told a story through movement rather than over-the-top stage design,” relying on two groups of dancers, says Rose. Most effective, he recalls, was the finale, during which Lamar chanted, “Godspeed for women’s rights,” as blood dripped from his thorny crown.
At a time when the live space is more competitive than ever, Rogg adds that such effective campaigning and messaging help set a tour apart — and cites a significant return on investment, too. Plus, adds Rose, the approach has recently helped OCA form relationships with nearly every major agency. “Artists and creatives — the great ones, at least — are always the ones coming up with what’s next,” says Rogg. “So we’re quite mindful of only representing the folks who are those trendsetters. They understand the bigger picture — and not just over one campaign, but across a whole career.”
This story will appear in the Feb. 4, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In 2020, Trenton Kyle was working as a librarian. Every day, he recalls, “I would come home and just make beats.” One night, he combined searing synthesizers and degraded drums into a bulldozing track and cold-emailed it to rising rapper SoFaygo, who eventually added vocals and put the song out that October as “Off the Map.” “People went nuts,” remembers Arshan Jawaid, founder of Kids Take Over, an Instagram page and YouTube channel that interviews rising rappers.
Soon after, Trippie Redd started to tease an incendiary track called “Miss the Rage,” which arrived in May 2021 and also built around a scraping, triumphant synth melody. By the end of that year, “Miss the Rage” had earned over 200 million on-demand streams, according to Luminate. And together with “Off the Map,” the song played a key role in popularizing a new hip-hop subgenre: rage.
The list of rappers affiliated with rage has exploded in the subsequent 18 months, and several seem poised to break out in 2023. The most notable example is Yeat, the Oregon native who earned over 2 billion on-demand streams last year with unruly songs full of laser-gun electronics and eccentric slang. Meanwhile, Destroy Lonely’s gleaming, synth-slathered title track to his August album, NO STYLIST, has become the Atlanta rapper’s most successful single to date, soundtracking over 165,000 TikTok videos and earning 35 million on-demand streams.
Established stars have also taken note of rage’s potent sound: YoungBoy Never Broke Again started 2023 with yet another top 10 album, I Rest My Case, that nods to the genre’s gnashing synths and rumbly low end. The rapper “is pushing [rage] even more into the mainstream than it already was,” says Kyle, who produced the new YoungBoy track “Not My Friend.”
While hip-hop producers have been mixing volatile ingredients in beats for years, searching for the most combustible combinations, rage is heavily indebted to the rowdy wing of SoundCloud rap that burst onto the mainstream six years ago. One artist who emerged from that scene is an especially important influence: Playboi Carti. Some of his songs offer a template of sorts for what is now dubbed rage: The bass hits like hurled cinder blocks, while the Day-Glo melodies seem plucked from the Mario Bros. soundtrack. Carti himself appeared with Redd on “Miss the Rage,” which helped give the style a name.
As a subgenre title, rage sounds pretty straightforward — anger, aggression, bricks through windows. But Ben Baker, who manages rage-adjacent rap artist Slump6s and producer Maajins, says the sound can include “headbanging stuff you mosh to at a concert” as well as tracks that are “slower and more melodic.” (Importantly, many rappers connected to rage also traffic in multiple styles.) What ties it all together, Maajins says, is “EDM-like synths playing a dark melody, hard-hitting 808s, and some nice percussive drums.”
This production palette helps rage stand out on the short-form video platforms that play an important role in modern music discovery. “Today, you’re scrolling and you see a song and listen for about three seconds to determine, ‘Is it good enough?’ ” Jawaid says. “With the rage beats, the synths always catch your ear right away.”
As a result, “this community and sound is getting a lot of attention,” says Jordan Weller, head of artist and investor relations at indify, a platform that helps independent acts find investors. (So much so that some rappers are wary of the “rage” label, fearing that it limits them to a single mode of music-making.) That attention isn’t just coming from stars like YoungBoy Never Broke Again; many rappers who release rage singles have forged deals with major labels.
Tana, who scored a record deal in 2021 with Republic in partnership with Galactic Records, says his battering single “Antisocial” is “one of the pioneer songs for the rage sound.” (Maajins produced “Antisocial,” which has over 100 million streams to date.) Slump6s, who is featured on the hit, also signed with Republic in partnership with Field Trip. And Field Trip inked Yeat in partnership with Geffen Records.
Other labels have gotten involved as well: 10K Projects picked up JELEEL!, who scored on TikTok with the shouty “DIVE IN!”, and Columbia has Cochise, whose boisterous “Tell Em” cracked the Hot 100. “I just give off energy to the point that it’s like, ‘ok, we can have you as an affiliate of the rage community,’” Cochise says. Carti’s own label, Opium, has signed Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely, both in partnership with Interscope.
Several of these artists will release new projects in the first half of 2023, looking to build on their initial success. “I went to the Destroy Lonely show in L.A. at the Hollywood Palladium [last November], and it was sold out,” Baker says. “He doesn’t yet have a song that has been on the Billboard charts — but he has a much stronger fan base than some artists who do.”
This story will appear in the Feb. 4, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In 2018, the Recording Academy increased the number of nominees in the Big Four Grammy categories — album, song and record of the year and best new artist — from five to eight. Then, three years later, it boosted the pool from eight to 10.
These expansions were made to recognize more music creators and to represent more genres, according to the academy — yet for country artists, the benefits have thus far been nonexistent.
For the five Grammy Award nomination cycles (for ceremonies taking place in 2019-2023) since the first increase, there have been 196 total Big Four nominations, yet only six have gone to mainstream country artists or projects, with only one victory: Kacey Musgraves’ album of the year trophy for Golden Hour in 2019. In the five cycles before the increase (2014-2018), country artists scored seven nominations of the far smaller 125 total nods.
For the 65th Grammys, which will take place Feb. 5 in Los Angeles, country music is completely absent from the Big Four.
Genre classification can be blurry, but for this story, Billboard counted nominations that went to an artist or music that appears on Billboard’s Country Airplay, Hot Country Songs and Top Country Albums charts or is traditionally considered country. For 2023, that means Brandi Carlile’s album and record of the year nods don’t count in the country tally (though her 2020 song of the year nomination for co-writing Tanya Tucker’s “Bring Me My Flowers Now” did); same with song of the year nominee Taylor Swift, who is now considered a pop artist despite her country start. Best new artist nominee Molly Tuttle plays bluegrass, and while the genre is a branch of country music, her music doesn’t appear on those Billboard charts.
Previous years also have not-quite-country outliers: Maren Morris’ record of the year nomination for appearing with Zedd and Grey on “The Middle” didn’t count in the 2019-2023 tally since it was a pop hit. Though Sturgill Simpson doesn’t receive mainstream country radio play, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth debuted at No. 1 on the Top Country Albums chart and the set won the Grammy for best country album in 2017, so its album of the year nomination counts in the 2014-2018 tally. Similarly, Margo Price, whose albums chart on Top Country Albums, counts for her 2019 best new artist nomination.
Shelly Maree, the Recording Academy’s country awards manager, considers the low recent total cyclical, in part. “Right now, we’re in another lull period where you’re not hearing country played on top 40 [radio], so you’re not really hearing anybody break through like that, [while] rap and hip-hop and dance are having huge moments,” she says. “You can really kind of plop down into any decade or any five-year period in our top four nominations and you’re going to see reflected what is of the era at that moment.”
But for the country community, the absence of representation in the general field illuminates a bigger concern: that the genre doesn’t receive the broader attention it deserves, hurting its chances at nominations for those trophies. While the academy deems all Grammys equal, the four general-field categories carry more prestige and receive greater media attention.
“Generally speaking, country music remains outside of the large pop music tent, which includes many of the contemporary genres like pop and hip-hop and rock,” says Beverly Keel, Middle Tennessee State University dean of the College of Media and Entertainment and a former MCA Records Nashville executive. “I think a lot of Grammy voters may not even listen to country, and I think there is, in many voters’ minds, still a stigma about country that it’s not as sophisticated, hokey, the music of the conservatives.”
Additionally, despite the notable rise in streaming among younger country artists, the music lacks the global reach some pop-oriented genres enjoy. “Most country stars are not international stars like Beyoncé, Rihanna, Bruno Mars,” Keel says. “Country is largely limited to the United States and Canada, so it doesn’t have the reach, whereas a pop song may be No. 1 in 20 countries.”
As Mary Hilliard Harrington, manager for Dierks Bentley and Elle King, notes by email: “Even prior to 2019, country has been grossly underrepresented in the main categories. It has always been a problem.” The three mainstream country artists with the most career nominations are Willie Nelson (56), Dolly Parton (53) and Vince Gill (47) — but Nelson and Gill have each landed only one Big Four nomination (in 1983 and 2008, respectively), while Parton has earned two (most recently in 1988).
The current generation of country hit-makers hasn’t fared much better. Miranda Lambert, who is nominated in all four country categories this year, has never received a Big Four nomination despite 27 career nods. Only one of Chris Stapleton’s 17 nominations has been in the general field, when Traveller received an album of the year nod for the 2016 Grammys. And one of country’s biggest new stars, Morgan Wallen, didn’t compete at all in 2022: He was shut out from Grammy nominations after his 2021 smash Dangerous: The Double Album was mired in controversy.
Country music has recently fared best in the new artist category, with Price, Luke Combs, Ingrid Andress and Jimmie Allen nabbing nominations since 2019. For the 2023 awards, Zach Bryan, the top new country artist on Billboard’s year-end charts, and rising star Lainey Wilson were both considered leading contenders for best new artist, and their respective labels (Warner Records and BBR Music Group) ran campaigns accordingly. But when nominations were announced in November, neither earned a best new artist nod, nor did anyone else from the genre. Though Wilson made significant press and TV appearances in an effort to reach as broad an audience as possible, Bryan made almost none, which sources say may have limited his exposure to Grammy voters.
Significantly, the overall voting pool lacks enough country advocates to consistently propel the genre into the Big Four without strong support from allies. Of the current 12,000-plus voting members, less than 10% identify with the country genre, according to the academy, compared with pop (23%), jazz (16%), rock (15%), R&B (15%), American roots (13%), alternative (10%) and classical (10%). (Voters can identify with as many genres as they want.) All voting members can cast ballots for the Big Four.
While qualifying creators can still apply to join the academy, following the recommendation of its Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion, in 2018 the academy began inviting creators to join as voting members. The move was meant to make the voting pool more reflective of the diverse creative community and initially focused on women, people of color and those under 40.
In recent years, however, potential new members who identify as country have received fewer invitations than peers in other popular genres. Of the 2,710 invitations extended in 2021, 9% of recipients identified with the country genre, with 13 other genres ranking higher. The highest percentage of invited voters identified as pop (29%), followed by R&B (23%), jazz (18%), alternative (18%), rock (16%) and rap (15%). In 2022, the academy welcomed nearly 2,000 new voting members; 9% cited country as their focus, compared with pop (33%), R&B (22%), alternative (19%) and rap (15%).
The country community’s easiest way to increase its odds would be by boosting its presence in the voting membership. “A really good place to start is talk to your friends and [ask], ‘Are you a Recording Academy member?’ And then step two is, ‘Are you voting?,’ ” Maree says. “This year, we were really encouraging our active members to fulfill that responsibility and use their voices, especially [since] the first round of voting directly dictates our nominations now that we no longer have nominating committees. ‘Are they voting?’ is the first thing we always ask people when they have any kind of questions about what they see when it comes to nominations day.”
Although Keel says a Grammy is “what people grow up dreaming about winning,” for country artists, the conversation doesn’t begin and end with one awards ceremony. More so than many other genres, country music has numerous awards shows to fete its own accomplishments, including the Country Music Association Awards, the Academy of Country Music Awards and the CMT Music Awards. Those ample additional opportunities to bring home trophies could help lessen the sting of a Grammy snub, Harrington says.
“At this point — because it’s nothing new — [the omissions are] more of an eye roll than outrage,” she says. “The country community is truly the best in terms of supporting its artists, celebrating great music and producing our own network television award shows. Being part of the Grammys is cool and a bucket list dream for a lot of artists, but we have it pretty good in Nashville. If we aren’t invited to that party, we’ll just throw our own.”
This story will appear in the Feb. 4, 2023, issue of Billboard.
“ ‘Love is the bridge between you and everything,’ ” Terius Nash reads aloud, gesturing to the words scrawled in the corner of an art piece. “Ah!” he claps. “I love it. These quotes are completely amazing.”
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The 45-year-old hit songwriter and artist, better known as The-Dream, sighs wistfully as he plops down on a peach-colored velvet love seat, which sits just beneath the artwork. Hung in an ornate gold frame, the piece depicts a group of people intertwined in collective embrace — a painting style reminiscent of Renaissance-era masterpieces — juxtaposed in front of an urban brick wall that’s splattered with various phrases written in technicolor graffiti. The artwork consumes an entire wall of the sitting room in The-Dream’s so-called “creative house” in the upscale Buckhead area of Atlanta. Otherwise, the room is completely bare — nothing but tall ceilings and crisp marble floors.
The-Dream adjusts his powder blue bucket hat and peers around his shoulder, back at the phrase. “I like how the longer you think about it,” he says, “the more you realize you don’t fully know what it means.” Its significance is determined by an individual’s perspective and understanding — just like the artwork itself, which he purchased three years ago at Eden Art Gallery in New York. With its hologram surface, its phrases are obscured when entering the room from the left… but from where The-Dream sits on the far right, the portrait shifts, its words clearly revealed.
The-Dream himself has unlocked some of the defining phrases in 21st century popular music, helping to craft smashes like Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” Justin Bieber’s “Baby” and Mariah Carey’s “Obsessed,” among many others. He has been present for studio sessions where the meaning of a word has expanded, then permeated popular culture in a different shape. He laughs when reminiscing about Beyoncé’s 2013 self-love anthem “Flawless,” and how he didn’t realize the full impact those eight letters could carry until he saw them needlepointed in scrolling cursive on a throw pillow following its release. “You don’t realize how many people wanted to capture that [feeling] until you see your lyrics on a pillow!” he says.
“This guy just writes a title that, when you read it, you know you have to listen to the song out of curiosity alone,” explains Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, The-Dream’s longtime writing and production partner. “I think he has an unmatched ability to figure out a unique lyrical perspective that can make an artist not only have a hit song, but a song that defines culture and the artist’s career. Something they can build on for the rest of their lives.”
Though The-Dream has been a behind-the-scenes force for the past two decades, he speaks to Billboard on the precipice of a career pinnacle, as evidenced by his presence at the 2023 Grammy Awards. He’s nominated in three of the Big Four categories — record, song and album of the year — for his work on Beyoncé’s seventh solo full-length, Renaissance, and its smash lead single, “Break My Soul.” The acclaimed album, along with his contributions to Pusha T’s It’s Almost Dry and Brent Faiyaz’s Wasteland, also earned The-Dream a nod in the inaugural songwriter of the year, non-classical category, where he will compete against Amy Allen, Nija Charles, Tobias Jesso Jr. and Laura Veltz.
Pusha T (left) and The-Dream attend The-Dream Listening Party at Gold Bar on December 18, 2018 in New York City.
Johnny Nunez/WireImage
“This means everything,” says Steven Victor — who manages The-Dream in addition to Pusha T, Nigo and others — of the new Grammy category, which he says The-Dream has advocated for for years. To Victor, a great songwriter can embody the points of view of many different types of artists — rap greats like Jay-Z and Pusha T, vocal powerhouses like Carey and Mary J. Blige, pop headliners like Bieber and Britney Spears, four-quadrant superstars like Beyoncé and Rihanna — and shape-shift into them regardless of their genre or personal identity. The-Dream, he vouches, is the best at this in the whole business.
“No one is going to think through these songs more than me,” The-Dream declares. Musical ideas often haunt him through the night, he explains, as more concepts, words and melodies flood his consciousness hours after a studio session ends. His creativity gnaws at him: He recently began attending fashion design classes at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and pulls out a collection of expert drawings — a sketch of a clementine, another of a skull.
“I drew a lot as a kid,” The-Dream says with a smile. When asked what he likes to draw most, he shrugs and thinks back to his overall creative approach: “I feel like I’m better when I have an assignment.”
“We had no idea what was happening at the time,” The-Dream says of growing up during the popularization of Atlanta’s music scene in the 1990s, when Southern rap reached the mainstream and acts like TLC and Usher took over pop. “It makes more sense to look back and understand it now.” He recalls watching the success of his neighbor and elementary school classmate T.I. and attending night classes with his pal André 3000 as a teen. “I don’t know what he did or why he was there,” he says with a laugh of the OutKast icon, “but I sure know I was flunking!”
Shortly after some of his acquaintances found musical success in Atlanta, The-Dream signed a publishing deal in 2001 with local mogul Laney Stewart, older brother of Tricky, and scored a writing credit on the B2K song “Everything.” Two years later, The-Dream linked up with Tricky — already producing hits for Mya and Blu Cantrell — and helped create the 2003 Britney Spears-Madonna team-up “Me Against the Music.” “It was explosive to write with him from the very beginning,” says Tricky. The pair complemented each other: Tricky was the perfectionist producer, and The-Dream was the emotive songwriter.
The pair’s brand of rhythmic pop took off in the second half of the decade, with “Umbrella” and “Single Ladies” reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 2007 and 2008, respectively, and “Baby” making Bieber a teen superstar in 2010. Meanwhile, The-Dream launched his career as an artist, signing with Def Jam and releasing a trio of R&B albums between 2007 and 2010: Love/Hate, Love vs. Money and Love King have earned a combined 2.25 million equivalent album units, according to Luminate.
Tricky Stewart (left) and The-Dream onstage during the 22nd annual ASCAP Rhythm and Soul Awards held at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on June 26, 2009 in Beverly Hills, California.
Lester Cohen/WireImage
His recording career has been sporadic since then, his focus constantly pulled back to creating hits for other artists. The-Dream says it’s difficult to define why he’s able to write so clearly about the experiences of others, “but really it’s my job to understand what the artist is going through, even if they don’t understand it yet,” he explains. “ ‘Umbrella’ is a love story, but for some reason, it feels like there is some misery in there too. Like, why do you need to assure this person they can count on you? Maybe, underneath, you know you haven’t had anyone to count on in your life, so you know what it means to be in that place.”
By 2018, the songwriter had turned that approach into one of the most bankable blueprints in popular music: over 70 Hot 100 entries as a songwriter, including 14 top 10 hits and five No. 1s, with 21 career Grammy nominations and five wins. That year, he sold 75% of his catalog, including his writing credits and solo releases, to Merck Mercuriadis’ Hipgnosis for a reported $23 million. It was the song fund’s first-ever catalog purchase.
“I wanted him to be the Dr. Dre to my Jimmy Iovine, if you like,” says Mercuriadis with a grin. “When we look back on the first 25 years of this millennium, I know his songs are going to be the ones people talk about.”
Throughout the 2010s, The-Dream shared the studio with all kinds of artists, but working with women vocalists was always his penchant. In the past, he has spoken about how the early death of his mother, who died of cancer when he was 15, gave him a “soft spot” when interacting with women. “There’s no such thing as a day with no grieving,” he says now, his eyes softening as he looks down at his sneakers.
After his mother’s death, he was put under the watchful eye of his grandfather, a hardscrabble cement mason who grew up in the Jim Crow South. The-Dream fondly recalls the days of listening to his grandfather talking “actively about how to make things well, looking at [them] from all different angles,” over games of pinochle with fellow masons. There’s an invisible throughline, he explains, between the ethos of a master builder, that of an artistic genius like da Vinci, and that of a songwriter like himself.
“When thinking about an artist like Beyoncé, I want to try to consider all the different ways this could reach people,” he says. “I want the song to matter to Beyoncé standing onstage, the person in the front row of the show and that person who’s in the rafters, who barely made it in, got a ticket from a friend last minute. I have to write for each one of them.”
The-Dream performs at the 2017 BET Experience on June 24, 2017 in Los Angeles, California.
Harmony Gerber/WireImage
“Single Ladies,” from Beyoncé’s 2008 album, I Am… Sasha Fierce, was the start of a long-term creative partnership and friendship between The-Dream and the superstar, who has tapped the songwriter to help craft at least one song from each of her subsequent albums — “Love on Top” from 2011’s 4, “Partition” from 2013’s Beyoncé and “6 Inch” from 2016’s Lemonade. (“Both Bey and I are Virgos,” The-Dream jokes, alluding to the astrological sign’s association with perfectionism.) For her latest release, Renaissance, The-Dream is one of the architects behind all but two of the album’s 16 tracks.
“Bey wanted to bring everyone together — that was the first thing on the board,” explains The-Dream of Beyoncé’s mission for her first solo album in six years. Following a tumultuous global period, he says, “It doesn’t matter who you are, we all know we were hurting,” and that the bounce, funk, house and all-around maximalist dance of Renaissance was intended as collective therapy.
For the album’s focal point, “Break My Soul,” The-Dream and Tricky teamed up to sketch out the single and then took it to Beyoncé, who “transformed it” into a No. 1 hit, says Tricky. “Dream and Bey’s closeness and attention to detail got us to a place with that song that we couldn’t have gotten [to] without that bond.”
Of course, many other collaborators also helped to finalize each Renaissance track — which songwriter Diane Warren questioned following the album’s July release. She took to Twitter to write, “How can there be 24 writers on a song?… This isn’t meant as shade, I’m just curious.” The-Dream replied in defense, schooling Warren with an explanation of sampling, its ties to Black culture and the lack of economic resources for Black musicians.
“By the way, I think she’s one of the greatest,” says The-Dream of Warren a few months after the exchange. “Sometimes [songwriters] lose that feeling, that connection to what art was all about in the first place. Really, it’s whatever it takes to give the world something good, so if that takes a whole gang of people… so be it.”
The way The-Dream speaks about collectively creating Renaissance mirrors his views on the role of the church as the birthplace of generations of talented Atlanta musicians, some known, many more unknown. “For us Southern Black folks… everybody was musical, everyone singing those hymns from back then,” he says with the fervor of a preacher at the pulpit. “I love hearing the gathering of people, huddled together, humming a song. No time signature. No industry. No three minutes and 30 seconds.”
Incorporating Southern culture’s sense of collectivism is not new for The-Dream and Houston-born Beyoncé, but Renaissance stands as their wholehearted embrace of the principle. “We learned to not be too big to call,” he says, reflecting on the process of inviting others to collaborate on the album. “If you think Grace Jones would sound great on something? Call. Nile Rodgers would be cool on this? Call.”
As a songwriter, The-Dream doesn’t control when artists release the songs he has helped pen — the timing is serendipitous, or “like lightning in a bottle,” as he puts it. So it’s a bit of kismet that, after his years spent fighting for a songwriting category, one of the biggest projects of his career is nominated in the award’s inaugural year.
“I keep thinking, ‘How is this happening?’ ” he asks. Win or lose, The-Dream is basking in the recognition. “It feels good,” he says. “Too good.”
This story will appear in the Feb. 4, 2023, issue of Billboard.
When tickets for Bad Bunny’s El Último Tour del Mundo arena tour went on presale in April 2021, his manager, Noah Assad, was cautiously optimistic.
“I thought we would do well, because it was post-pandemic and everyone wanted to go out, but we went on sale without really knowing — and we did it a year out for that very reason,” says Assad.
For Assad, “doing well” has become synonymous with breaking some sort of record. But even he wasn’t expecting Bad Bunny to have one of the most historic, record-setting runs for an artist in the history of the Billboard charts. El Último Tour del Mundo’s presale date became the top sales day for any tour on Ticketmaster since Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s On the Run II tour went on sale in 2018, and the run sold out 480,000 tickets in less than a week.
Four months after El Último Tour del Mundo wrapped in April 2022, Bad Bunny embarked on his World’s Hottest Tour stadium run, becoming the first artist to ever mount separate $100 million-plus tours in the same calendar year. Ultimately, his 81 concerts in 2022 grossed $434.9 million, the highest calendar-year total for an artist since Billboard Boxscore launched in the late 1980s. The tour broke local revenue records in 13 North American markets en route to becoming the biggest Latin tour ever.
Bad Bunny’s chart dominance made him Billboard’s top artist of the year, by the numbers, the first Latin act and the first artist who records in a language other than English to earn the distinction. His album Un Verano Sin Ti, released in May on Assad’s independent label, Rimas Entertainment, and distributed by The Orchard, became the first non-English set to ever top the year-end Billboard 200 Albums ranking and the first all-Spanish release nominated for album of the year at the Grammy Awards, one of Bad Bunny’s three nods.
“I was very proud about that one, especially because it was 100% a Spanish-language album,” says Assad. “It doesn’t have even a verse in English.”
On top of that, in April, Bad Bunny will become the first Latin act to headline Coachella. And, Assad, 32, is realizing some milestones of his own, including being named Billboard’s youngest-ever Executive of the Year and the first Latino to secure the honor.
His achievement underscores not only the growing worldwide popularity and profitability of Latin music, but also shines a light on what an upstart independent can do — regardless of genre or the backing of a legacy company — when armed with guts, hustle, deep musical knowledge, loyalty and the confidence to break rules and create new ones.
Bad Bunny is signed to Assad’s label, Rimas Entertainment, which originated in 2014 as a digital marketing and distribution company. It has evolved to become a 100-plus-person operation with distribution from The Orchard, with a roster ranging from veterans (Arcángel, Jowell & Randy) to promising newcomers (Mora, Eladio Carrión), many of whom are signed to 360 deals. Rimas ended 2022 at No. 7 on Billboard’s year-end Top Labels chart and at No. 1 on the year-end Top Latin Labels chart, with 23 charting albums by seven artists besides Bad Bunny.
Assad also launched RSM Publishing, which is administered by Universal Music Publishing Group and was No. 1 on Billboard’s year-end Hot Latin Songs Publishers list. And while Bad Bunny is his most visible management client, Assad also started managing Karol G 18 months ago with his new management firm, Habibi, with stellar results. Her 2022 $trip Love tour, promoted by AEG Presents, grossed $69.9 million with 410,000 tickets sold across 33 arena shows in North America — the highest-earning U.S tour ever by a female Latin act, according to Billboard Boxscore.
“Noah has an unmatched understanding of his artists,” says Jody Gerson, chairman/CEO of UMPG. “His instincts about how to market and promote them, as he has done so well with Bad Bunny and Karol G, are among the best I’ve ever seen in the business. As an executive, Noah is loyal, honest, innovative and smart, and these are just some of the many traits that make him a fantastic partner.”
Though only 32, Assad considers himself a “semi-vet. I may be ‘new’ to a lot of people, but I’ve been at this for 12 years,” he says with a laugh. A self-professed reggaetón nerd with long blonde hair that matches his laid-back surfer vibe, Assad — born to a Lebanese father and a mother from St. Croix — grew up in Puerto Rico, and since seventh grade has been “consumed with reggaetón culture.” By 16, he was promoting house parties, booking the likes of Farruko before he became a big name and cultivating relationships with already established acts like Plan B’s Chencho Corleone. “Chencho was the first established artist to simply say yes to me,” says Assad, a favor that has paid dividends for Corleone; “Me Porto Bonito,” his smash collaboration on Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti, became the first all-Spanish song to top Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart. That full-circle moment highlights Assad’s reputation for cultivating relationships with contacts to whom he stays loyal. “We work with everybody; we are always coexisting,” he told Billboard last year. Witness his deals with opposing teams at The Orchard and Universal, while his top touring acts — Bad Bunny and Karol G — work with Live Nation and AEG, respectively.
“Noah is similar to Bad Bunny in that he’s also a unicorn,” says Henry Cárdenas, the veteran promoter and founder of CMN, which produced and promoted Bad Bunny’s last two tours, including the stadium tour in partnership with Live Nation. “The guy’s going to create an empire, and he’s a man of his word. I compare him to the old managers, where we closed business with a handshake, and he’s appreciative. Where I’m concerned, he has continued to take me into account, and it harks back to the fact that I worked with him from the very beginning.”
While Assad’s success feels very of the moment — in keeping with his young acts, the relatively recent mainstream success of reggaetón and Bad Bunny’s fondness for releasing music with little or no notice — he’s actually a planner; like his famous client, he takes a long view on success. It wasn’t always this way. As a young promoter, Assad recalls struggling mightily to make a buck (and often getting “hustled”) in what he half-jokingly refers to as “the reggaetón depression era” of 2009-2016, when the music was largely consumed for free and money came almost solely from live shows.
“YouTube was the outlet that turned it into a commercial business,” says Assad, who says he struck an early deal with the platform to monetize the millions of views the music generated for many independent artists and eventually for his own — including a 22-year-old who called himself Bad Bunny. “I didn’t have the privilege to work with an artist who was already established, but I was very fortunate to have Bunny trust me and work with me. Bunny makes me look good,” he says. Alongside his artist, Assad began thinking long term, and even when his actions seem improvised, they are anything but. Take the one-two punch of back-to-back tours with a hit album in between, conceived after ticket prices to Bad Bunny’s arena tour started soaring just after they went on sale in 2021.
“We started getting the heat, but we didn’t think of stadiums until the summer,” says Assad, pointing out that Bad Bunny already had plans to release a new album when the arena tour wrapped. By October, a plan had been made: arenas in February, an album in May and a stadium tour in June to be announced in January with a series of humorous videos featuring Bad Bunny’s girlfriend, Gabriela Berlingari, and Spanish actor Mario Casas. “There’s a lot of pivoting along the way, but we still follow the plan,” says Assad. “And everything we do has to make sense. If it doesn’t make sense, even if it’s beautiful, we pass.”
“Noah is singular in his sense of the moment, commitment to a vision and fearlessness,” says UTA agent Jbeau Lewis, who books Bad Bunny and Karol G. “Noah understands his artists, he always plays the long game, and he’s unafraid to say no.”
Bad Bunny has said repeatedly that he plans to take a break after Coachella, from both recording and touring. But for Assad, the work of growing his business never slows. Last year, in partnership with The Orchard, he launched Sonar, a label for developing acts that already has deals with over 50 artists from around the world, including non-Latin acts. Assad also began a strategic alliance with Live Nation to develop new businesses outside of touring, including Gekko, the restaurant Bad Bunny opened in Miami in August with hospitality entrepreneur David Grutman. Most recently, he announced the launch of Rimas Sports, a stand-alone management company (name notwithstanding, it is not a division of Rimas Entertainment) whose client list already includes the Toronto Blue Jays’ Santiago Espinal and Diego Cartaya, a top prospect for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Assad says his biggest goal for 2023 has nothing to do with business, however. “I want to fly less, enjoy more and spend as much time as I can in Puerto Rico,” he says. “That’s my goal. People look at me and think that because of the hair I’m from Mississippi or something. But I’m just a kid from Carolina, Puerto Rico, who loves reggaetón.”
This story will appear in the Feb. 4, 2023, issue of Billboard.
As Billboard publishes its 135th volume throughout 2023, stay in the know on the magazine’s print schedule for the year, along with each issue’s corresponding theme. This is an updating post, so be sure to check back for any changes.
Issue Date: Feb. 4, 2023Theme: The Billboard Power 100
Issue Date: Feb. 25, 2023Theme: Women in Music
Issue Date: March 11, 2023Theme: SXSW
Issue Date: April 1, 2023Theme: Touring*This issue will include Top Music Lawyers
Issue Date: April 22, 2023Theme: K-Pop*This issue will include International Power Players
Issue Date: May 13, 2023Theme: 40 Under 40
Issue Date: June 3, 2023Theme: Country Power Players
Issue Date: June 10, 2023Theme: Pride*This issue will include Indie Power Players
Issue Date: July 15, 2023Theme: Publicity
Issue Date: Aug. 5, 2023Theme: R&B/Hip-Hop Power Players
Issue Date: Aug. 26, 2023Theme: Tech/Fall Music Preview
Issue Date: Sept. 16, 2023Theme: Latin Music Week
Issue Date: Oct. 7, 2023 (Double Issue)Theme: Grammy Preview*This issue will include Top Music Business Schools
Issue Date: Oct. 28, 2023Theme: Producers/Managers*This issue will include Top Music Business Managers
Issue Date: Nov. 18, 2023Theme: Gaming
Issue Date: Dec. 9, 2023Theme: No. 1’s and Year In Music
Issue Date: Dec. 16, 2023Theme: Grammy Voter Guide
Up a winding mountain road on the edge of Salt Lake City, past snow-dusted pines and freshly shoveled driveways, through a wrought iron gate that opens at the command of an armed guard yawning in a pickup truck, sits a handful of mansions designed like rustic ski resorts — and one that looks like a modernist mall. Another security guard idles at the end of the outlier’s heated driveway, which slopes past a garage where Maybachs and McLarens sit alongside muddy, toddler-sized four-wheelers and a terrarium housing a sleeping bearded dragon. At the front door, an inflatable Santa stands sentry, holding a sign that warns, “Nine Days Until Christmas!”
On a clear day like today, you can look out the living room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, over the icy swimming pool and presently invisible dirt bike track below, and the entirety of the Salt Lake Valley spreads out before you like an overturned snow globe. Inside, the space is all white and sparsely furnished, decorated with a pair of spindly Christmas trees, a half-dozen painted portraits — in one, a smiling young man feeds his daughter a cheeseburger — and an enormous plaque that glints in the sunlight and reads, “100 RIAA Gold/Platinum Certifications,” and, in larger letters, “YoungBoy Never Broke Again.” Its recipient, who introduces himself as Kentrell, sits quietly beneath it as a motherly woman named Quintina, who is not his mother but his financial adviser, paints his fingernails black.
The neighbors have yet to figure out who exactly it is that moved in just over a year ago: a rail-thin 23-year-old with faded face tattoos and a stable of luxury vehicles that never leave the garage. Should they learn that he is signed to Motown Records and makes music as YoungBoy Never Broke Again, it’s likely they would still draw a blank. (A middle-aged blonde from the mansion next door cranes her neck from the window of her SUV to gawk at the camera crew unloading outside for today’s cover shoot.) And it’s true that the artist born Kentrell DeSean Gaulden, whom fans call YoungBoy or simply YB, has practically zero mainstream presence: He’s not on the radio, scarcely performs live, regularly deactivates his social media accounts and shies away from the press.
Yet in an extreme and emblematic case of streaming-era stardom, YoungBoy is one of the most popular and prolific rappers on the planet. Since breaking out from his hometown of Baton Rouge, La., at age 15 — already sounding like a world-weary veteran who had absorbed a lifetime of pain — he has landed 96 entries on the Billboard Hot 100 and 26 projects on the Billboard 200. (Of the latter, 12 charted in the top 10, and four went to No. 1.) Of the whopping eight full-length projects he released in 2022 alone, five reached the top 10; his latest, January’s I Rest My Case, debuted at No. 9. YoungBoy was the third most-streamed artist in the United States last year (according to Luminate), behind Drake and Taylor Swift, and currently sits at No. 1 on YouTube’s Top Artists page, where he has charted for the last 309 weeks. After deducting a presumed 10% management fee, Billboard estimates YoungBoy’s take-home pay from artist and publishing streaming royalties averaged between $8.7 million and $13.4 million annually over the last three years, depending on the structure of his publishing contract and level of artist royalty his recording contract pays out. The NBA’s coolest young team, the Memphis Grizzlies, warms up to his music almost exclusively.
YoungBoy Never Broke Again photographed on December 16, 2022 in Utah.
Diwang Valdez
He’s known for churning out releases with machine-like efficiency and for the legal battles that have haunted his career from day one, to the extent that both feel like essential components of the art itself. As a public figure, he’s inscrutable, but in song, he comes alive — equal parts outlaw and confidant, commiserating with listeners’ struggles and declaring vendettas in the same breath. And though his path may strike some as counterintuitive, YoungBoy’s perpetual underdog status only galvanizes his die-hard supporters, for whom aggrievement has become a calling card, regularly spamming comment sections in frantic defense of their favorite.
Since moving to Utah, YoungBoy has left his house exactly zero times; an ankle monitor will trigger if he so much as crosses the end of his driveway. After fleeing police, who had stopped him in Los Angeles with a federal warrant stemming from a 2020 arrest — where he was one of 16 people picked up on felony drug and weapons charges at a video shoot — he spent most of 2021 in a Louisiana jail. In October 2021, a judge granted him permission to serve house arrest in Salt Lake City at the request of his lawyers. (Hence the security team, whose presence is to enforce the terms of his incarceration as much as for his protection. Those terms include a limit of three preapproved visitors at a time, turning today’s shoot into an elaborate exercise in consolidation.) The 2020 arrest was the latest in a string of allegations that began when YoungBoy was 15. Last year, he was found not guilty in one of his two federal gun trials; the other is ongoing.
YoungBoy lives here with Jazlyn Mychelle, whom he quietly married in the first week of 2023, and their two children: a 17-month-old named Alice (after his grandmother) and a newborn boy, Klemenza (named for a character in The Godfather whose loyalty the rapper admires). They are the youngest of the 23-year-old YoungBoy’s 10 children. The other eight live with their seven respective mothers. Most people in his position would be counting down the days until freedom, but besides the fact that his “purposeless” car collection is steadily depreciating in value, YoungBoy is in no rush to return to the world. “This is the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says with an expensive-looking smile, having traded his diamond grill for pearly veneers, as his nail polish dries in the sunlight.
Even inside, YoungBoy rarely hangs out upstairs. He usually stays up until dawn in the basement, playing Xbox or recording songs all night, never touching pen to paper — instead, he freestyles line by line according to what’s weighing on his mind. By his estimate, over 1,000 unreleased tracks currently sit in the vaults. His nocturnal tendencies are a “protection thing,” he explains. “It has been like that since I was 15: I’ve got to be somewhere where I actually know no one is inside the room,” he says in a voice I have to lean in to hear, a near whisper that feels worlds away from the fearless squawk that booms out in his songs, hurling threats at a seemingly endless number of enemies. “I like to just stay in one small space where I don’t have to worry about anything that’s not safe.”
For a while, he had a habit of sleeping in the garage — in the Tesla, where he could turn on the heat without fear of death by carbon monoxide poisoning, and where he and his engineer, XO, would sometimes record. Lately, he stays up smoking cigars in the basement — his last remaining vice, he says. “Nighttime, when everybody’s asleep — it’s the most peaceful time ever inside of life to me,” he whispers. “Nighttime, when it’s dark and nothing’s moving but the wildlife and the crooks.” He has seen his share of deer and rabbits scurrying around the property, and though he has yet to spy a bobcat, the security guards have. He watches for intruders, too, a matter of routine. What he likes best is that it’s peaceful here, and that “it’s very far from home.”
Kentrell Gaulden wrote his first song in fourth grade, and he still remembers how it started. He giggles as he launches in: “It goes, ‘P—y n—s always in my face/Bang, bang, bang, there go the murder case.’ And I keep saying it.” Growing up in north Baton Rouge, his mother, an amateur rapper herself under the name Ms. Sherhonda, would bring Kentrell and his older sister to watch her record in a neighbor’s home studio. His father was sentenced to 55 years for armed robbery when he was 8. Years later, when a teenage Gaulden was locked up himself for a 2014 robbery charge, he received a letter from another jail — from his father, telling his son about his own musical dabblings. “I never had a Plan B. This is what I was set on becoming,” YoungBoy says, his narrow frame engulfed in a skull-patterned puffer jacket, a tangle of diamonds flashing underneath. His early songs inspired a school friend to write his own, and YoungBoy smiles remembering the two giddily trading rhymes before class. “But he died,” he adds, barely breaking his gaze. “If I’m not mistaken, they was robbing someone, and as he took off, he met his consequence.”
The Baton Rouge in YoungBoy’s raps is rife with mortal danger, a place where death is an old acquaintance and betrayal lurks around every corner. On 2016’s “38 Baby,” around the time the rapper’s local buzz was going national, YoungBoy half-sang, half-rapped that he “got the law up on my ass, demons up in my dreams,” claiming to not even step in the recording booth unarmed. It was startling to see who was behind such a nihilistic worldview: a gangly teen whose baby face was marked three times across the forehead with scars from a halo brace he wore after breaking his neck as a toddler. Artist Partner Group CEO Mike Caren (who worked for years with YoungBoy’s former label, Atlantic, and the artist’s own Never Broke Again imprint, and remains his publisher), remembers his first time seeing the “38 Baby” video.
“The intensity was so powerful,” Caren recalls. “He was youthful and seasoned at the same time. He had presence, a natural sense of melody, and he painted an entire picture of his world.” A bitter brand of authenticity emerged from the contrast of YoungBoy’s boyishness and the obvious trauma that hovered over him like a black cloud. To hear one of his songs was to listen in on the shockingly intimate confessions of someone forced into adulthood against his will, and to witness his expression catch up to his experience in real time.
You could cherry-pick the history of Louisiana hip-hop and cobble together something like a precedent for YoungBoy: the swampy street tales and prolific output of the labels No Limit and Cash Money; the embrace of balladry, bounce and traumatized blues; the pure indifference to industry protocols. YoungBoy’s early releases gestured to 20-odd years of Baton Rouge rap, from Trill Entertainment’s dark-sided club jams to Kevin Gates’ warbled bloodletting — music that was sometimes about women or money but mostly, and most profoundly, about pain. In recent years, YoungBoy’s rapping has matured into a style that stands apart from his predecessors, veering off into complicated rhythms and electrifying spoken-word diatribes, as on last year’s eight-minute missive “This Not a Song (This for My Supporters),” where he warns listeners not to be fooled by the glamour of gangster rap. Still, the old pain sears through nearly every freestyled verse.
It was his “pain music” in particular that first drew the attention of Kyle “Montana” Claiborne, a wisecracking 36-year-old Baton Rouge native. YoungBoy’s songs were only available on YouTube in 2016 when the two met, and though Montana was twice YoungBoy’s age, the music hit him hard. “I wasn’t a rapper, but I wanted to live like a rapper,” he says, and with no real industry experience, he became the 16-year-old’s right-hand man, driving him hours to play shows for $500 a pop. YoungBoy’s buzz was steadily building on YouTube and Instagram “back when followers was real and organic,” Montana stresses. Meanwhile, he was recording enough music to drop an album per week, propelled by a private urgency.
The Never Broke Again label was created in Montana’s name since YoungBoy was a minor; today, they share ownership of the company, which partnered with Motown in 2021, a year ahead of YoungBoy’s solo deal with the label. In late 2016, the pair traveled to New Orleans to meet in a parking lot with Fee Banks, who had helped Lil Wayne launch his Young Money label and managed Gates into stardom. Banks saw in YoungBoy a similar greatness and immediately took over as his manager.
“YoungBoy was moving fast, but he had a lot of drama attached to him,” Banks recalls. “Soon as I got in touch with him, he went to jail. Anything he got into, we got him out, and every time he got out of jail, he’d gotten bigger. Throughout all the trials and tribulations, we kept it moving, kept recording, kept shooting videos and stayed down.”
YoungBoy’s buzz had caught the ear of another Louisiana native: Bryan “Birdman” Williams, who co-founded Cash Money Records and mentored a young Lil Wayne, among many others. In his signature twang, Williams recalls flying a teenage YoungBoy to Miami, where they recorded daily for two weeks, working on what eventually became their 2021 collaborative album, From the Bayou. “Watching how fast he do music and the value of the music, I saw a lot of similarities between him and Wayne,” he says. “I seen stardom in him, but I knew it was a process.”
Williams made it a mission to impress upon the teenager that he had a choice: the life he was raised in or the music. “I once was somebody like him and had to gamble my life. I wanted to show him that he could really survive off his talent,” he continues. “You could go to jail, or you could die, or you could try to be somebody.” As he does with Wayne, he refers to YoungBoy as a son.
Diwang Valdez
By the time labels had entered a bidding war, YoungBoy was a cult hero with eight mixtapes under his belt. He was also a teenage father of three being tried as an adult for attempted murder, facing a life sentence without parole. He had been apprehended before a show in Austin, accused of a nonfatal Baton Rouge shooting that occurred hours after a friend’s murder; after six months awaiting trial in a Louisiana prison, he ultimately took a plea deal. At his 2017 sentencing — by which point he had committed to a $2 million deal with Atlantic Records — the judge cited his music as a means of “normalizing violence,” one of many recent instances of rap lyrics being used as evidence in criminal proceedings. With your talent, she lectured, comes responsibility. He received a suspended 10-year prison term with three years of probation. More disturbing allegations emerged in the years to follow, including kidnapping, assault and weapons charges tied to a 2018 incident recorded in a hotel hallway showing the rapper attacking his girlfriend.
One night in prison while YoungBoy was on lockdown (“For no disciplinary reason — it was because of who I was”), he prayed to see his late grandmother one last time. He had lived in her home for much of his childhood, crying on the occasions when he had to return to his mom’s house. Her name, Alice Gaulden, frequently appears in his lyrics, and her massive painted portrait hangs by the fireplace; after our interview, I catch him smiling beneath it in silence, one hand resting on the image of her face. “And I remember, I ain’t crazy — she hugged me. I felt her,” he recalls softly, and despite his serene expression, his legs begin to tremble, at first subtly, then unignorably. “After that, I didn’t want to go back to sleep. I didn’t even care about the situation I was in. I felt like I was secure.”
His grandmother died in 2010, and YoungBoy was sent to a group home. “I used to get beat up inside the group home for no reason,” he continues as the shaking intensifies, though his quiet voice never falters. “The other boys would put their hands on me, and I would look up like, ‘Why are you hitting me, bro? What’d I do?’ It made me discover another side of me that I never glorified or liked. I found out how to be the person that you don’t want to do that with. [Before then], I never understood all the evilness or wrong because I was showered by so much love from this one person.”
By now, YoungBoy is shaking from head to toe with alarming intensity, his jewelry audibly rattling. “It’s not going to stop,” he calmly replies when I suggest we take a break. Quintina, who began as his accountant and now appears to also function as a surrogate mother, kneels beside his chair to hold his hand. “I’m OK,” YoungBoy assures her. Composing himself, though the trembling continues, he focuses his gaze.
“I’m very scared right now,” he confesses. “It’s just natural. I’m not big on people.” For most of his life, expressing or explaining himself has taken place behind a microphone, alone. “I never knew why once I walked on the stage, I could get it done and leave — but I am terrified of people. People are cruel. This is a cruel place.” He swivels in his seat toward the blue and white panorama behind him. “You’ve got to be thankful for it. It’s very beautiful, you know? There’s so much you can experience inside of it. But it is a very cruel place. And it’s not my home.” The smile he cracks has a strange effect — sweetness embedded in a wince.
“I don’t want to know what it means to die — but do we actually die, or do we go on to the real life? What if we’re all just asleep right now?” he wonders aloud as the shaking dies down. “It’s all a big test, I think.”
Diwang Valdez
Perhaps you’re wondering how a Baton Rouge rapper on house arrest finds himself deep in the heart of Mormon country. Those listening closely may have noticed YoungBoy name-dropping Utah’s capital from the beginning: “Take a trip to Salt Lake City, cross the mountain, ’cause that’s called living,” he chirped on “Kickin Sh-t” seven years ago. He first came here as a boy, he explains, as part of a youth outreach group initiative, and became very close with one of its leaders, a Utah native he declines to name, though he mentions she was married at the time to a professional baseball player. Today, he refers to the woman as his mom. “She’s a wonderful person. She’s just there when I need her,” he says softly. “She christened me, if I’m not mistaken, and then she brought me back here to meet her family. When I got here, it was always my goal: I’m going to move here. I’m going to have a home here. This is where my family is going to be.” Courtroom testimony from his 2021 hearing shows his attorneys reasoning that a permanent move to Utah would keep their client away from trouble; after some initial skepticism, the judge agreed.
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.”
When they returned, he invited them in, explaining the things about himself he was desperate to change. “It was just cool to see someone with a different mindset that had nothing to do with business or money — just these wonderful souls,” he recounts. He has come to look forward to their daily visits, during which they discuss the Book of Mormon and “make sure my heart is in the right space” for his official baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ the Latter-day Saints, a rite that forgives past sins through repentance, according to Mormon theology. He’s saving the ceremony for after his ankle monitor is removed. “Even when my negative thoughts come back, when I do want to tell them, ‘Not today,’ I just don’t let nothing stop it,” he says. (Later I learn that during our talk, two carloads of chipper, clean-cut missionaries in their early 20s did, in fact, appear at the property’s gate and were turned away only due to the visitor limit.)
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As for whether the missionaries know who he is, YoungBoy doesn’t ask; frankly, it could go either way. He epitomizes “invisible music stardom,” the streaming-era phenomenon in which artists have massive fan bases but relatively minor pop culture footprints, illustrating a disjunction between what’s promoted and what is truly resonating. His particular success is often attributed to his relentless productivity, in some ways more like that of a “content creator” than a traditional musician. “I have never heard of a fan saying that their favorite artist is putting out too much music unless the quality goes down,” says Caren, noting YoungBoy’s impressive consistency.
As for his lack of a ubiquitous hit — for all of his chart-topping full-lengths and 96 Hot 100 entries, the highest YoungBoy has charted as a sole lead artist has been No. 28, for 2020’s “Lil Top” and 2021’s “Bad Morning” — Caren argues he has had them, just not in the places you’d expect. “He moved too fast for the radio. He was always on to the next thing. You can’t stick around and promote the same song for five months when you’re making multiple albums in that time period.” And though his numbers are mighty across all streaming platforms (on Spotify, he has over 17 million monthly listeners), his popularity is most closely associated with YouTube, where his fans first found him, and where he can upload new music directly to his 12.1 million subscribers, bypassing the mainstream industry apparatus entirely.
It was YoungBoy’s peerless work ethic that first grabbed the attention of Motown vp of A&R Kenoe Jordan. The Grammy-nominated producer and fellow Baton Rouge native had monitored the rapper’s career from the jump, impressed by what the teenager and his Never Broke Again label had accomplished with limited resources. “In Louisiana, we have the most talented musicians in the world, but the window of opportunity is very small,” Jordan says from the work-in-progress Never Broke Again headquarters in Houston: half office building, half giant garage full of lethal-looking ATVs and bench press racks. After signing a global joint venture with the Never Broke Again label, Jordan was determined to sign YoungBoy himself, who had voiced frustration with Atlantic in some since-deleted online comments that had some fans petitioning Atlantic to release him from his deal. Jordan announced YoungBoy’s signing with Motown in October 2022, following the completion of his contract with Atlantic.
Jordan calls YoungBoy and company some of the hardest-working people in the industry, known to spring an impromptu album on the label without warning. “His formula is already there,” Jordan adds. “He knows what he wants. You just have to make sure you’re able to deliver on the things that he asks you to do.” YoungBoy’s partners have simply learned to trust him whether or not they see the vision. Montana laughs remembering nights spent driving to undisclosed locations: “He do some of the oddest things, and nobody knows why he’s doing it but him.”
Diwang Valdez
As strategies go, YoungBoy’s makes sense — flood the market, circumvent the system, keep the fans and the algorithms satiated — but it doesn’t entirely explain why he puts out as much music as he does. What analysts would credit to a master plan, YoungBoy describes as a compulsion. “It’s a disease,” he says starkly. “Literally, I cannot help myself. I tell myself sometimes, ‘I’m not going to drop until months from now,’ but it’s addictive. I wish I knew when I was younger how unhealthy this was for me. Whatever type of energy I had inside me, I would’ve pushed it toward something else.” From someone whose music seems like his truest form of release, it’s an astonishing claim. “The music is therapy, but I can’t stop it when I want,” he goes on, sounding almost ashamed. “And the lifestyle is just a big distraction from your real purpose.”
As if some private dam has broken, YoungBoy’s words now spill out urgently. “I’m at a point now in my life where I just know hurting people is not the way, and I feel very manipulated, even at this moment,” he says, his brown eyes flashing. “I was set on being the greatest at what I did and what I spoke about. Man, I was flooded with millions of dollars from the time I was 16 all the way to this point, and I woke up one morning like, ‘Damn. They got me. They made me do their dirty work.’ Man, look at the sh-t I put in these people’s ears.” By “they,” he’s alluding to the rappers he once looked up to as examples of how to live and those who bankroll them. His voice wavers, then steadies. “I think about how many lives I actually am responsible for when it comes to my music. How many girls I got feeling like if you don’t go about a situation that your boyfriend’s bringing on you in his way, you’re wrong? How many people have put this sh-t in their ears and actually went and hurt someone? Or how many kids felt like they needed to tote a gun and walked out the house and toted it the wrong way? Now he’s fixing to sit there and do years of his life that he can’t get back.”
A shiver streaks through him again, rattling his knees. “I was brought up around a lot of f–ked-up sh-t — that’s what I knew, and that’s what I gave back to the world,” YoungBoy continues, spitting out his words like they’re sour. “I was like, ‘F–k the world before they f–k you.’ I was a child, you know? And now I know better, so it ain’t no excuse at all for how I carry on today.” His gaze doesn’t flinch. “It took lots of time to make my music strong enough to get it to where I could captivate you. I promise to clean whatever I can clean, but it’s going to take time, just like it took time for me to get it to that point.” He takes a sharp breath, then whispers: “I was wrong. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
YoungBoy’s music is commonly understood as brooding, ruthless and retaliatory. A running meme shows his fans moving through life with comic aggression: belligerently whipping clean laundry into the basket, holding up a rubber duck at gunpoint in the bath. That’s an oversimplification of the range of his subject matter — family, betrayal, loyalty, loss — but it isn’t entirely off the mark, either; on YouTube, listeners have compiled extensive playlists with titles like “1 Hour of Violent NBA YoungBoy Music (Part 4).” It’s a specter that looms over the bulk of his catalog, from early videos where his teenage friends wave Glocks at the camera to songs like last year’s “I Hate YoungBoy,” where he fires warning shots at half the industry and drops ominous bars like “I’m gon’ be rich inside my casket once my time gone.” It’s tough to imagine what a pacifist YoungBoy song might sound like, much less an entire album of it, and recent attempts at anti-violence messaging haven’t landed the way he intended: “As I start to promote the peace and say, ‘Stop the violence,’ I think I’m inciting a riot,” he rapped on “This Not a Song (This for My Supporters)” last year.
“Pacifist YoungBoy” isn’t fully realized on his latest record, I Rest My Case — his first for Motown, which he dropped with almost no promotion on Jan. 6. (It was the day before his private wedding to Mychelle, a 20-year-old beauty YouTuber who quietly tends to the babies in between posing for a few photos, at his insistence, during the cover shoot.) But it is a step in that direction, an album that mostly traffics in extravagant stunting over buzz-saw synths associated with the EDM/trap hybrid known as rage music. To celebrate its release, YoungBoy invited around 50 giddy fans over for a snowball fight and video shoot, jumping atop his Bentley truck to blast album opener “Black” from the court-approved safety of the driveway. The noisy crowd dispersed only when a couple emerged from next door to request they keep it down. “It’s a lot of old people here, really,” a poncho-clad blonde — the same one who had driven curiously past the house weeks before — cheerfully tells a TikTok reporter. “If he comes and asks, would you spare him a cup of flour?” the TikToker asks. “Of course we would!” she replies.
YoungBoy Never Broke Again photographed on December 16, 2022 in Utah.
Diwang Valdez
I Rest My Case is an obvious departure, lyrically and aesthetically, from what YoungBoy’s fans are used to, and across the internet, early reactions were mixed: Some praised their favorite rapper’s innovation, others longed for the old days. YoungBoy’s previous album, The Last Slimeto, debuted last August at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 108,000 equivalent album units, according to Luminate; just five months later, I Rest My Case debuted at No. 9 with 29,000 equivalent album units. “Be completely honest: Do you want YB back on drugs toting guns if it means we gon get that old YB back?” read one Reddit post.
YoungBoy expected this. “I’m very curious to see how the world goes about me now,” he contemplated weeks before in his living room, adding that he tried to avoid the usual mentions of guns, though there are still a few. He has thought a lot about what attracted people to his music until now: “They listened because of who I supposedly was or showed I was and what I rapped about. Now it’s nail polish and face paint, and the music is not the same.” (Lately, alongside the black nails, he and Mychelle like to paint their faces like goth Jokers and skulk around the property at night.) “What if they don’t like me now?” he wonders, fiddling with a diamond pinky ring. “You can’t be on top forever, you know? Because I’m not changing. I will not be provoked, I will not be broken, and I’m not going back to who I used to be. Accept it or not — I ain’t going back.” YoungBoy breaks into a smile. “I’m only going to get more groovy from here.” He’s already preparing his next album, which he’s calling Don’t Try This at Home.
Only once does YoungBoy remember it snowing in Baton Rouge; here in the mountains this time of year, it sits at least two feet deep daily. After checking briefly on the babies, he lights a cigar and beckons me through the garage and down toward the wooded dirt bike track, yelping for XO to join us. Out here, it’s a postcard: white trees, white mountains, ice blue sky. Everyone’s up to their knees in snow, and no one’s more excited about it than YoungBoy, whose ripped white jeans and jacket have now become camouflage. He points animatedly to where the bike path goes, a clearing where you can do doughnuts. “Five K for a snow angel!” he dares XO, who came hardly prepared in a hoodie and slides. “Just fall back! But at least put your hood on.” XO topples backward into a puff of powder and sweeps out an angel silhouette to YoungBoy’s delight, and the two laugh as they tramp back uphill.
As for what will happen when his ankle monitor is removed, YoungBoy would rather not think about it. No date is currently scheduled for his remaining federal trial, according to an email from his lawyer, because “the government is appealing the court’s ruling on our motion to suppress evidence, and that matter is pending before the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.” They declined to comment on his bail conditions. “The day I walk out this door and am free to do what I want, it’s going to be a lot of doing, or it will be done to me,” YoungBoy says. “So I’m not rushing back to that. I have a family.” He doesn’t plan to leave Utah anytime soon, though eventually, he would like to buy a place with even more land “where no one knows what’s going on on it.” He has spoken previously about his disinterest in touring but might reconsider if the shows were overseas where he could see some new places — he has always wanted to visit the Eiffel Tower, especially since watching Ratatouille. Asked what he looks forward to most, YoungBoy hesitates for a moment. “Change,” he replies softly. “I am very curious of the person who I shall become.”
This story will appear in the Feb. 4, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In June, the Recording Academy announced five new competitive categories for the 65th annual Grammy Awards on Feb. 5, 2023, hosted by Trevor Noah. The additions spotlight performers, songwriters, video game soundtrack composers and more, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. telling Billboard at the time, “We’re doing it in a way to make sure we’re representing music and that’s ultimately our goal.”
With the music industry always evolving, Billboard asked artists spanning several genres,What category would you like to see the Recording Academy add to the Grammys next and why? See their responses below:
Omar Apollo: I’d love for the Recording Academy to add an engineer of the year award. Engineers are so important to the musical process and should get as much shine as producers and writers. Thank you to my engineer, Nathan Phillips — he was a big part of the process for my album, Ivory.
Taylor Bennett: I would love to see hip-hop join the Grammy categories. For years now, I’ve seen record stores, digital streaming platforms and awards shows branding “hip-hop/rap.” Although hip-hop and rap can be considered close cousins, I do believe there is great distinction between the two.
Priscilla Block: Best new (genre) artist: As a new artist, it means the entire world to get recognized by an association as prestigious as the [Recording Academy]. There is so much new talent in every genre, so I think it would add a lot to the Grammys to recognize each one’s best new artist. These are the rising stars that will turn into music’s next superstars.
Robert Glasper: Best mixed genre album: This category doesn’t exist. It’s for the people who make albums that represent and speak to more than one genre of music!
Gryffin: I would like to see the Recording Academy add best electronic/dance producer. Due to the nature of dance/electronic music, most artists [nominated] are producers, and it would be incredible for the Recording Academy to recognize the producers in the space who are innovating and pushing the genre forward. I believe that there are so many incredible producers who are pushing the boundaries of electronic dance music whose songs may not qualify under the best dance/electronic song or album categories.
Wet Leg: Best lo-fi recording. Our track “Angelica” was recorded on the Isle of Wight in our living room on a laptop with just a few mics. It would be great to have a category that highlights other artists who are making music in this way despite not having access to many resources.
Lolo Zouaï: It would be cool to have a special bilingual album category — not language-specific — to highlight all the multilingual artists out right now mixing English with other languages. Either that or a category awarding independently released albums that doesn’t focus on genre necessarily.
Kim Petras: The category I would add to the Grammys would be “the biggest slay,” of course. Woo-ah!
A version of this story originally appeared in the Dec. 17, 2022, issue of Billboard.
Sir Elton John, who recently performed at Dodger Stadium for the final U.S. show of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road trek, is now within striking distance of the Billboard Boxscore record for highest-grossing tour. He says it’s his last. Billboard has charted the Rocket Man’s ascent and journey through the pop culture firmament since his first Hot 100 top 10, “Your Song,” to his latest, “Hold Me Closer” with Britney Spears.It’s a Little Bit Funny…
Before “Border Song” crossed over to the Hot 100, Billboard took in John’s career-making U.S. debut at the Los Angeles Troubadour for the Sept. 5, 1970, issue and remarked on his “Southern Comfort style” vocals. By the Nov. 28 issue, “Your Song” was climbing the Hot 100, but Billboard wasn’t fully on board. “Elton John faces a major decision in his short career. Does he abandon his valid musical skills in favor of being a ‘stage freak?’ ” sniped one writer, who sniffed at “cheap, silly” antics like “banging the keyboard with his boot.” We hope you don’t mind that we put this down in words, Sir Elton.
Bennie and the Jet Set
By the time the rocker appeared at the Hollywood Bowl in 1973 with “a torrent of homing pigeons” and “none other than Linda Lovelace of Deep Throat fame,” the Oct. 6 issue was more supportive of his “unusually flamboyant” and “high-energy piano-vocal stylings.” In the next issue, an MCA Records executive reported that the double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was enjoying the label’s “biggest initial orders to date.”
Captain Fantastic
By 1976, John was omnipresent. “’Pinball Wizard’ by Elton John I can play once an hour, and half an hour later get four or five phone requests for it,” marveled a Philadelphia DJ in the June 12 issue. In the Aug. 7 issue, a survey of radio listeners who regularly bought records revealed John was “a clear favorite with 27.8% of the respondents.” In the July 31 Billboard, his name was used as shorthand for rock n’ roll itself: “Steve Ford, son of President Ford, is showing up at more rock shows than Elton John these days.”
Still Standing — And Thriving
By the mid-1990s, John had been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and won an Academy Award. And as reported in the Oct. 11, 1997, issue, John’s tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, “Candle in the Wind 1997,” “blew away the previous record for largest SoundScan week” by selling “nearly 3.5 million singles its first week.” The following year, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Can You Feel the Love Tonight?
In 1992, John started a pioneering HIV/ AIDS nonprofit. Sharing the Oct. 24, 2015, Billboard cover with his friend Lady Gaga, John wrote, “I believe with all my heart that in my lifetime I will have seen the very first day, and also the very last day, of the AIDS epidemic.” Gaga was inspired. “When I’m with him,” she told Billboard, “I just want to be a part of his genius plan to save the world.”
This story originally appeared in the Dec. 17, 2022, issue of Billboard.
Since the business of Christmas music is growing so fast – it occupies five of the top 10 places on the Billboard Hot 100 this week – we are re-presenting some of our stories from Christmas past. This piece, about how two former Billboard staffers produced the holiday hit “Christmas Rappin’” for then-up-and-coming rapper Kurtis Blow, originally ran in 2019. Since then, in 2020, Robert Ford passed away.
One groundbreaking Christmas hit didn’t just make the Billboard charts — it was produced by two former employees. In 1979, J.B. Moore and Robert Ford left the magazine to produce “Christmas Rappin’ ” for an up-and-coming rapper named Kurtis Blow. Released on Mercury Records, the single went gold, and Blow became the first rapper to sign a major-label deal.
At Billboard, Moore was an ad salesman who sometimes wrote music reviews, and Ford was a production manager who also wrote a column about R&B. They both knew that hip-hop represented the future of music — Public Enemy’s Chuck D has cited a 1978 article by Ford as one of the first mentions of the genre in a national publication. Even so, they didn’t get any interest from A&R executives in New York, so they took “Chrismas Rappin’ ” to Chicago-based Mercury Records, where John Stainze, a recent transfer from the label’s U.K. office to its West Coast operations, convinced Mercury that the song would recoup its costs (about $6,000, remembers Moore) in the United Kingdom alone.
“Christmas Rappin’ ” — a song “ ’bout a red-suited dude with a friendly attitude” — wasn’t originally intended to be a Christmas tune. Moore, who wrote the lyrics, decided to give it a holiday theme because labels like songs they can sell every December. “Christmas Rappin’ ” turned out to be one: It peaked at No. 53 on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart in 1995 and at No. 35 on Hot Rap Songs in 1999.
“It took Mercury forever to realize how big it was,” says Moore, who with Ford went on to produce Blow’s landmark “The Breaks” and work with the R&B group Full Force. “I’m sitting here staring at my gold record that should be platinum.”
This article originally appeared in the Dec. 21 issue of Billboard.