Maybe We Know a Little Too Much About Lil Yachty

Last year, I spoke with Lil Yachty about mystique. Our conversation about his Let’s Start Here album got awkward when he told me he didn’t want to reveal too much about its creation. I asked him about plans to release a documentary he recorded about the project, and he told me, “I doubt I’ll drop it. Just like me not wanting to do any of these interviews. I don’t really care to talk about it, [because] you give it all away [when] you pull the curtain back.”

When I asked him if he put a premium on artists with an allure of mystery when he was younger, he told me, “Coming up, you didn’t have all this social media. Even if [they] did an interview, you didn’t get every element of something. It’s the simple things you knew, but they left a lot of room for ‘Wow, how did he make this?’… Which is the beauty in art.” 

I came away from the interview feeling like Yachty was poised to transition into an enigmatic artist who would drop any kind of album without rhyme, reason, or explanation. We might even start calling him that ever-present buzzword: “reclusive.” He had the taste, peer respect, and industry connections to simply drop his music and go. 

“I think Chapter One of my career is extremely oversaturated,” he told me. “I was thinking … I’m easily accessible. I’m on TikTok. I’m on YouTube. I’m on Twitter. I’m just everywhere. I didn’t like that.” But 18 months after our conversation, it feels like Yachty’s would-be triumphant next chapter is being marred by the same overexposure. 

Instead of rap fans raving about his improbable career arc from a polarizing face of “mumble rap” to an accomplished ghostwriter who can explore almost any sound, people are riffing off jokes like “Don’t let that nigga Lil Yachty give you a McChicken, that nigga gon tell errbody.” This latest round of polarizing press, after breaking with his former Concrete Boys artist Karrahboo, came after he went on live and pledged to fall back from social media. While part of him vies to lurk in the shadows like his friend Drake, solely communicating through ambiguous Instagram stories, maybe an internet baby just doesn’t know how to be mysterious. 

Yachty’s rap career is defined by a collage of viral moments. His first single, 2015’s “One Night,” went viral on SoundCloud. He came into public consciousness during the 2016 live stream of Yeezy Season 3. His “Minnesota” hit was the score to the hip-hop generational war being waged on rap Twitter, with his ignorance of Biggie and 2Pac’s catalog not helping things. And his Everyday Struggle admission that he didn’t know the full details of his QC contract made him fodder for anyone seeking to soapbox about naive rappers signing bad deals. Yachty saw all of the criticism, and he pushed back, arguably losing the musical charm that made him a distinct artist by trying to prove he could rap. He told me, that during that period, “I was trying to be the spokesman for the new generation because no one else wanted to talk. I felt, ‘I’m going to stand up. I’m going to speak.’”

Later in the conversation, he told me, “If I’m not doing anything, I’m just usually browsing the internet, deep diving.” It makes sense that he scoured the rap internet and made inroads with Detroit cult heroes, collaborating with them on 2021’s Michigan Boy Boat. His online savvy is also why we see him co-signing up-and-coming acts like Dave Blunts, U.K. drill act Nemzzz, and, to much dismay, Ian. 

Let’s Start Here feels like the work of a terminally online artist pursuing the cutting edge. His yodel-esque vocals roam free over the psychedelic rock palette crafted by musicians such as Alex G, Mac DeMarco, SADPONY, and Patrick Winberly. It’s the kind of sonic excursion any rapper would flex about making, especially when they were counted out like Yachty had been in the early 2020s. He followed the album with several standout rap tracks including “The Secret Recipe” with J. Cole, which made our 2023 Best Rap Songs list. Even Kendrick rapping, “Yachty can’t give you no swag either,” in his “Euphoria” Drake diss lent him credibility; who in 2016, would have predicted Yachty being seen as the biggest rapper in the world’s not-so-secret weapon? He had become rap’s latest, greatest comeback story. 

But it never stays strictly about the music with Yachty. During a Let’s Start Here listening event he told the crowd, he “wanted to be taken seriously as an artist and not just a SoundCloud rapper, not just a mumble rapper, not just a guy that made one hit.” Some people felt his comments implied that being “just” a rapper was inferior, but he told me that was “absolutely not” what he was trying to say. Regardless of his clarification, the perception of elitism stuck, and was intensified when he surmised, “Hip-hop is in a terrible place,” during our November 2023 Musicians on Musicians Live event. 

The hits have continued throughout 2024: He surmised that rappers were turning on Drake “’cause he’s the guy. It’s also probably that he fucked everyone’s bitch,” which feels like a childishly reductive stance given Kendrick’s (and others’) criticism of Drake’s culture-vulture-ish ways. In August, he talked to Andrew Schulz about leaking a bootleg of “Super Soaker,” a song that sampled online creator Mr. Hot Spot, who didn’t want to clear the song because of his recent religious conversion. Yachty’s decision to bring up the discrepancy on a podcast caused his fanbase, and Drake’s, to harass Mr. Hot Spot on social media, which felt like an inconsiderate power play. And that moment came shortly after he got the Big Apple hot when he said Bronx residents “cannot dress” while dressed like someone living uptown in 2008.

In a vacuum, any one of his comments is harmless enough to shrug off. But one after the other, they collectively paint a portrait of an artist who’s not as respectful, or tapped in, to culture as he posits. Shortly after the New York fashion comments, Yachty took to Instagram Live to clarify that he loves New York and declare, “I’m getting the fuck off that — I’m not doing no more talking. I don’t get shit else to say. I’m gone off this internet shit, I think I’m gone for the rest of the year. I swear to god.” Maybe he temporarily forgot he had a podcast. Just a week later, a clip from his A Safe Space pod went viral where he told his co-host Mitch that he was lucky to know him in a condescending tone. And days later, he crashed all the way out after a tweet where a fan divulged that Karrahboo told her that Yachty bullied her. 

During an emotionally charged Instagram Live session, he claimed that he wrote all of Karrahboo’s music and threw the remaining Concrete Boys under the bus by claiming he dressed all of them. He and Karrahboo have since been taking to their stories to clap back at each other, making a bad situation worse. Yachty’s currently being lambasted as the kind of person who can’t wait to tell the world what they did for you — you never wanna be that guy. 

Perhaps people are letting the jokes fly for the moment, and Yachty dropping the right song will shift all the attention away from his mic miscues. Maybe Yachty doesn’t care what the public thinks. But it’s interesting to watch someone who’s repeatedly referenced not wanting to be accessible, and wishing he hadn’t opened his mouth, seemingly be unable to help himself from speaking out — in frequently self-sabotaging ways. It feels like the same digital soil that fertilized Yachty’s career is also his quicksand.