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. (Hence the security team, whose presence is to enforce the terms of his incarceration as much as for his protection. In October 2021, a judge granted him permission to serve house arrest in Salt Lake City at the request of his lawyers. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. YoungBoy Never Broke Again photographed on Decemin Utah. The NBA’s coolest young team, the Memphis Grizzlies, warms up to his music almost exclusively. 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. 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. (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. 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. Yet in an extreme and emblematic case of streaming-era stardom, YoungBoy is one of the most popular and prolific rappers on the planet. (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. 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. 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. 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. 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. YoungBoy Never Broke Again: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot
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