Punk horrified its elders; now trap appals its listeners’ parents. Nineteen-year-old Atlanta rapper Lil Yachty, though, presents a very modern controversy. Releasing his first official album after two mixtapes and a slew of featured verses, Yachty isn’t just sifting the youngsters from the fossils with an annoying, Auto-tuned warble. He is gleefully disrupting hip-hop – possibly pop music itself – with his “bubblegum trap”. Rap traditionalists have been aghast at the up’n’comer’s irreverence for the canon, an issue that came to a head in 2016 when Yachty went on New York radio station Hot 97 and had the temerity not to care about Nas’s back catalogue.
You’ll find Teenage Emotions filed under hip-hop, but it’s a deeply millennial take. Released last month, Peek a Boo (heavily featuring Yachty’s Quality Control labelmates Migos) might actually be the most “hip-hop” thing this cutesy arriviste has released so far. It’s a graphic exemplar of the contemporary Atlanta sound: stark backing, nagging hook and staccato wordplay, as distinct from the lyricism that traditionalists hold dear.
A song such as Bring it Back – a wistful 80s pop tune – completely busts the genre, however: it’s sung, not rapped. It’s the logical endpoint of Yachty’s disruptive modus operandi. On previous mixtapes and EPs, Miles Parks McCollum has distinguished himself from all those other Auto-tuned rappers with an ebullient, un-gangsta persona, kidult concerns (“We are the youth!” he yelled persuasively on Summer Songs 2, his last mixtape) and variable delivery: check out the grating falsetto in 2016’s Minnesota. His breakout hit, 1Night, broke out because of the meme-worthiness of the semi-animated video as much as Yachty’s sing-song melody. “I’m on some other shit,” he hams on Otha Shit, a Teenage Emotions skit.
There is much to admire in his approach: an almost punk disregard for virtuosity, teenage directness. The cover, meanwhile, is a tableau of acceptance and diversity: boys kissing, chunky girls, people with albinism and vitiligo. Yachty’s output has been designed to appeal well beyond hip-hop’s carefully policed borders and, over 21 tracks, Teenage Emotions roils with chip-tune noises and offhand verve. Significantly, McCollum made sure he was an Instagram notable before releasing music; sometimes, it feels like his cartoonish visuals and social media strategies are leagues ahead of the music itself.
It’s easy to be appalled though. Drill down into Teenage Emotions and the chief feeling seems to be unreconstructed misogyny. What the teetotal Yachty lacks in references to drink and drugs, he overcompensates for in his contempt for girls, who are – except for his mother – “bitches” who “want nothing but his money”. Say My Name shares a title of a famous Destiny’s Child tune, a feminist plea to be more than a notch on a bedpost. Yachty uses it as an exhortation to boost his fame further.
