One of rap’s most popular artists secures his crown in the biggest tour of his career.
Newark was more than just prepared for YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s sold-out concert at the Prudential Center earlier this week—the city was teeming with excitement. Before I could find parking, vendors were sauntering up and down outside the venue at the intersection of Edison Place and Mulberry Street, selling bootleg tour tees and neon-green paisley print bandanas (I heard the word “bandana” no less than six times times before I crossed over from the parking complex.) Concertgoers were tailgating in other lots, bumping songs like “My Shit” from YB’s 2024 album MASA and “Boom” from 2020’s Top. Before it even began, this show was already the place to be.
This hype is not unearned. Though he’s not played on the radio and is largely ignored by traditional press, YoungBoy, with his blend of melodic pain rap and aggressively violent dispatches from the streets of Baton Rouge, is unfathomably popular. He has multiple platinum albums and singles to his name and generates tens of millions of streams every month, with his biggest driver being YouTube Music (as of this writing, he’s #1 on the service’s Weekly Top Artists chart, beating out names like Bad Bunny, Drake, and The Weeknd, and has been a presence somewhere on the chart for 450 consecutive weeks.) Offset, one-third of the now-defunct Georgia trio Migos and a multiplatinum solo artist in his own right, is the opener for this tour, if that’s any indication.
This niche, self-sustaining as it is, comes with plenty of baggage. YoungBoy has faced multiple criminal charges, including for attempted murder and kidnapping; in 2018, he took a plea deal for physically assaulting his then-girlfriend Jania Jackson. Then came his relationship with President Trump, who saved him from a two-year sentence for gun possession as a convicted felon with a pardon this past May, and for whom YoungBoy named his eighth studio album, MASA, or Make America Slime Again, a riff on Trump’s infamous campaign slogan. Amidst all that controversy, he’s beloved by fans, who draw deep connection from mutual mental health struggles and the harrowing intensity of his grisly murder raps.
On the line, women with bright green weave FaceTimed friends for locations and pre-teens there with fathers, mothers, and older brothers fumbled with their phones trying to access their ticket barcodes. The crowd was majority Black, unsurprising considering this is one of the biggest rap concerts of the year in a city where nearly half the population is African-American. The word “YN,” a haphazard abbreviation for “young nigga,” is thrown around at least twice by a few attendees too old to be there. There was an overwhelming police presence across the venue and a strict no-bag policy, likely because of racist assumptions about attendees sneaking guns in (YoungBoy’s recent show at the United Center in Chicago was outright canceled for similar reasons.)
After the openers finished, the lights came down for YoungBoy’s set to raucous cheers, signalling for a large red curtain to be yanked away. On the other side was an elaborate stage setup: a model house with flickering lights took up most of stage right next to power lines towering over a cemetery with several tombstones. A line of dancers in American flag bandanas and fatigue skirts soon appeared to take shots with fake rifles before a coffin descended from above with YoungBoy inside, his hands draped over his chest like a Chrome Hearts Dracula. He rapped the fiery opening verse to MASA’s self-titled track, though I could barely make out the words over the crowd’s screams.
The crowd’s energy rarely faltered throughout the night. YoungBoy, on the other hand, approached the show with a quiet magnetism. He spent most of his set slowly pacing the stage, pulling from a blunt in between his fingers and occasionally rocking to the beat, as he did on early highlights like “Dangerous Love” and the dark groove of “Right Foot Creep.”
The set was split into three acts, each peppered with a near-equal amount of energetic rap songs and mellower melodic cuts and a few stage prop changes. The house on stage right eventually cracked open, revealing a living room inside occasionally rimmed with fire, and a platform that rose from the ground while he spit his verses from the Birdman collab “Black Ball.” YoungBoy only ever got as energetic as the song demanded, so joints like the trumpeting “Games of War” and the perpetually memed “Freeddawg” were electric, but friends, his backup dancers, and even a few onstage fans were the ones keeping the energy levels high.
Yes, like other MASA tour dates before it, this one had the kind of cartoonish aggression that’s gone viral. Several kids in my section stood and danced on top of their seats during “No Smoke,” with one getting so excited he accidentally punches me in the back of the head. One in a plain white tee who couldn’t have been older than 10 was doing imaginary money spreads to “Games of War” on the show floor. Every rap-heavy track turned the crowd into an impromptu cipher, green bandanas waving every which way.
But what brought the show to another level was the surprisingly tender moments, with every ballad becoming the largest karaoke session in Newark. Men held their girlfriends during sung portions, sure. But they also wrapped their arms around their male best friend’s shoulders as they shouted along to “Shot Callin” and tenderly embraced each other while belting out “Valuable Pain.” As YoungBoy sang “Heart and Soul,” I caught a glimpse of a man in a silk ski mask singing every word with misty eyes and a cracking voice.
YoungBoy doesn’t need to directly address the audience to maintain this kind of connection. The only time he did so was to say goodbye to the crowd after a spirited run-through of the AI YoungBoy 2 standout “Lonely Child:” “Thank you so much for coming out to the tour. See you next time.” His voice was halting, like he had to gird himself to get through it. At least part of the appeal of the YoungBoy enterprise stems from the sense of danger that come from his songs—and his laundry list of controversies. That night in Brick City, the bleeding heart at the center of his music rang even louder than the cries of the adoring arena.