In a story narrated by Matthew Trammell, we get a vision of a sunny side of YG with cascading darkness and pitfalls. This introspective interview/story paints a picture with a steady, yet, unhinged hand. As we all wait for Still Krazy, we implore you took dive head first into this wondrous tale of YG.
Peep some of the excerpts below.
Life certainly hasn’t always been this sweet for YG. Like on that one sunny morning back in 2008 when a friend short on rent asked him to come along for a quick score in nearby Lakewood. “He hit me up to go flock,” YG says between bites of wings, invoking the colorful local term for breaking and entering. “I’m one of the niggas that knew how to do the shit. It’s 11 a.m., broad daylight. I’m like, ‘Come get me.’”
YG is a funny dude and a compelling storyteller. He speaks in sharp bursts, at turns boastful and comedic and brimming with Cali slang, and he uses charisma and rhetorical flourishes (repetition here, a quick joke there) to pull listeners in and make them feel like co-conspirators along for the ride.
“I’m climbing in the window,” he says. “Get halfway through the window, the police pull up. Boom.” He punctuates the sentence with a pound of his fists. “‘Freeze!’”
Of course, he did not freeze.
“We get on,” he says, picking up the pace. “We running. It’s a big-ass neighborhood. We hopping all through backyards. We hiding on top of roofs. You ever see the buildings that have the big-ass plastic—they put the tent over it when they spraying fumes? It’s a house with a tent on it. I go hide under the tent. I’m trying to hold my breath. My nigga, the police is, like, right here. They move, I hear them. So I hop out the tent and start running. They start chasing me again.”
The whole thing sounds like something out of a crime drama you’ve seen before: young black male running down some palm tree-lined street in broad daylight, LAPD hot on his tail.
“We hit another backyard,” he says. “Come out the other side, police got the whole shit blocked off. Man, they had the helicopters and all that. Twenty police cars. So we run back in the backyard. It’s some old pickup truck…
“I’m laying under the truck like, ‘Fuck,’” he says. “We caught. It’s all bad.”
Read the rest here. You better.