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.
Read Next: YoungBoy Never Broke Again pardoned by Donald Trump…