Music
15 Songs That Prove Lil Yachty Can Actually Rap
Hip-hop heads love to hate on Yachty, but trust us. He's got bars.
When hip-hop purists criticize a young artist like Lil Yachty for a perceived deficiency in his rapping abilities, what they’re really decrying is his lack of attachment to hip-hop’s history and canon. Unlike contemporaries such as J. Cole or Kendrick Lamar, Yachty’s music has a tendency to sound less in conversation with history but instead divorced from it — little of what he does resembles the sort of rapping one might find on classic genre-fitting albums like “Illmatic” or “Southernplayalisticadilacmuzik,” which were made when Nas and OutKast were about the same age as Yachty is now.
But while the genre’s followers pine for an era when rappers won respect through the structural integrity of their bars, what they fail to pick up on is that hip-hop is inherently avant-garde music. What made rappers like Nas and OutKast so groundbreaking wasn’t just that they were great rappers, but also that they took pains to rap in ways unlike anyone who had come before them. Lil Yachty has this in common. But where pushing hip-hop forward once meant refining one’s flow and experimenting with new cadences, today those at the genre’s bleeding edge are toying with the very idea of what rap means in the first place.
Still, it’s not like Lil Yachty doesn’t have skills — though he often gets knocked for rapping behind the beat or engaging with it only tangentially, there’s no reason not to view this as a stylistic innovation following in the boundary-pushing traditions of countless pioneers that came before him. In celebration of last week’s release of Yachty’s debut album, “Teenage Emotions,” here are 15 songs where Lil Yachty goes in and proves himself worthy of respect.
15. "It Takes Two" (Lil Yachty ft. Carly Rae Jepsen)
Though in his opening verse, Yachty raps, "I’m not the most lyrical kid known, but I’m known to keep the party goin'," it takes serious moxie to cover Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s legendary “It Takes Two,” and Lil Yachty doesn’t fail to deliver the goods. Here, he drops his more off-kilter style and plays things relatively straight. If nothing else, he definitely out-raps Carly Rae Jepsen on this.
14. "Lost Files Intro"
One of the things that tends to get lost in the shuffle is that Lil Yachty has a better understanding of hip-hop genealogy than people give him credit for. After all, his father is Shannon McCollum, a respected Atlanta hip-hop photographer, who exposed his son to an eclectic range of music in his youth. Here, Yachty positions his fun-loving, party-starting Sailing Team squad as the second coming of 2 Live Crew on the intro to an EP, “The Lost Files,” whose title functions as a sly reference to the genre’s past. After all, “The Lost Files” was curated by producer Digital Nas, hearkening back to “The Lost Tapes,” one of hip-hop’s great B-Sides collections — released, of course, by the original Nas.
13. "Up Next 2" (ft. Big Brutha Chubba and Byou)
Here, Lil Yachty and his compatriots revisit the woozy, wobbling beat for his breakout hit “One Night,” recasting it as a frenetic posse cut as Yachty spits with a style that feels simultaneously relaxed and frantic. Joined by Big Brutha Chubba and Byou, Yachty uses his words percussively, letting them fill in for the drums that are otherwise absent on the airy instrumental.
12. "Hip Hopper" (Blac Youngsta ft. Lil Yachty)
On “Hip Hopper,” Yachty and CMG breakout star Blac Youngsta mock the sanctimonious attitudes of their critics, name-checking the late Pimp C — who disdained hip-hop purists and made a point of terming his music “country rap tunes” — and turning the term “hip-hop” itself into a slang for getting jacked. Befitting the track’s flippancy, Yachty’s verse is full of mischievous flow switch-ups and playful turns of phrase.
11. "All You Had to Say"
Though Yachty’s “Teenage Emotions” only features the occasional lyrical workout, he spends much of the album sneaking dexterous turns of phrase into verses where he displays a more melodic style. On “All You Had to Say,” he crams the lines, “miscellaneous occasions where I needed you as back up” into the same space he'd just used to sing, “Everybody not as real as they say.” That the moment slips by without much notice is a testament to Yachty’s song-crafting skill and attitude towards lyrical acrobatics — it’s just one of many tools to be deployed when the time is right.
10. "Peek A Boo" (ft. Migos)
On “Teenage Emotions” single “Peek A Boo,” Yachty enlists Migos and manages to sound like the group’s lost fourth member, slipping effortlessly into their triplicate-heavy acrobatics. Yachty further proves himself as a stylist when he affects a faux-refined voice to rap, “Aiming at you and your fellows.” In case you were worried that Yachty isn’t really about that life, he ends his verse by comparing himself to a pigeon.
9. "Ran Up a Check" (Cash Out ft. Lil Yachty)
Cash Out is one of Atlanta’s unsung pioneers of flow, his cadence slowly meandering throughout his verse here in a hypnotic, almost jazz-like lilt, until he’s ended up somewhere miles away from where he started. Yachty more than ably keeps up, starting slow then letting words nimbly pile up for a few bars before unexpectedly returning to his original pace on the second-to-last bar.
8. "Neon Derek Jeter" (ft. RiFF RAFF and Lil Yachty)
Much like Yachty himself, RiFF RAFF’s idiosyncrasies and refusal to take hip-hop too seriously tends to deter the genre’s doctrinaires while masking a penchant for experimentation and discovery that would make those same purists proud if they’d just give him a chance. It was only natural that Yachty and RiFF RAFF would make a song together and that the song, “Neon Derek Jeter,” would randomly feature some of the most conventional rapping in either artist’s catalog.
7. "Forever Young"
This “Teenage Emotions” highlight finds Lil Yachty teaming with producer Diplo and engaging in some high-speed, robotic toasting for a summery track that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Major Lazer album. When Yachty slips into a double-time flow, his words slur mellifluously, mimicking the intoxication of young love he’s singing about on the hook.
6. "Intro"
For the intro to his breakout “Lil Boat” mixtape, Yachty, pretending to be his uncle Darnell, delineates between his “Lil Boat” and “Lil Yachty” persona, explaining that Boat, “He’s a little … he’s a little bit more aggressive.” On the track, that means the Lil Boat persona gets to rap — and rap he does, dropping charmingly scatterbrained bars that march in lockstep with producer TheGoodPerry’s whirring beat.
5. "King of Teens"
In a sense, hip-hop is a feudal society — rappers stake claims over scenes, cities, styles and regions, and until they relinquish their title or get publicly washed by a challenger, the crown is theirs. “Summer Songs 2” highlight “King of Teens” is Yachty’s statement of intent, a declaration that when it comes to the youth, he’ll be running things for the time being. He merges his slippery, AutoTuned singing with his subtle formalist tendencies on the song’s first verse, letting anyone else who has designs on America’s hypebeast teens that when he’s not joking around, he’s as formidable an opponent as they come.
4. "Up Next 3" (ft. G Herbo)
Sometimes it seems as if Yachty has a chip on his shoulder when it comes to his rapping — he goes out of his way to make tracks that prove his critics wrong and show that he actually has bars. “Up Next 3,” where he makes a point of keeping up with G Herbo, the young Chicago rapper renowned for his lyrical abilities, is one of those times. Though such decisions could easily come across as defensive or even ill-advised, “Up Next 3” is undeniably thrilling, with Yachty’s dizzying flights of imagery — Versace feathers! Cars racing boats! Genitalia rendered as a churro! — providing an entertaining counterpoint to Herbo’s grounded and gruff tough talk.
3. "Mase in '97"
Mase, too, was a rapper whose unconventional style belied his pop appeal, preferring to attack his beats with a loping gait rather than tackling them head-on. On “Mase in ‘97,” Yachty takes producer Carnage’s buzzing, blaring instrumental and wrestles it to the ground, matching the beat’s intensity with a sustained burst of cathartic fast-raps. By the end of the track, he’s nearly screaming. Does Lil Yachty really own the tiki bar and pool full of Fiji Water as he claims? No one will ever know — such are the mysteries of Lil Boat.
2. "From the D to the A" (Tee Grizzley ft. Lil Yachty)
Tee Grizzley, the newest breakout in Detroit’s crop of young stars in the making, enlisted Yachty for this one-off single shortly before the release of his star-making “My Moment” mixtape. Besides being a great song on its own merits, the collaboration is illustrative, showing that Yachty’s off-kilter style fits with many in the Detroit scene. In their attempts to get everything in their heads out, Yachty and Grizzley rush ahead of the instrumental only to return in due time, quite literally running circles around the beat while trading bars.
1. "Neon Lights" (Taylor Bennett ft. Supa Bwe and Lil Yachty)
On this track with Chance the Rapper’s younger brother Taylor Bennett, Lil Yachty delivers his verse in a cadence that, while reminiscent of the spoken word scene that gave rise to Chance and his milieu, comes totally out of left field for Yachty. “It’s gettin’ scary to the old heads/ ‘Cause hip-hop is changing each and every day/ And I’m the nigga pickin’ out the clothes,” he proclaims, following the boast up with the self-deprecating line, “I used to get called a joke, well, I still get called a joke.” It’s as far a departure from his typical flow as one can imagine, a call-back to hip-hop’s roots that’s so inscrutable and imaginative, its context so unexpected, that it could only come from Lil Boat himself.
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