You can love him or hate him — and many fall vehemently into one camp or another — but you can’t deny the passion of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. It tends to bleed into both his music and rants alike, imbuing the former with a welcome sense of vulnerability, the latter with disturbing volatility. Unfortunately, the balance has proven too difficult to bear for the young hip-hop star, who recently vowed to stop releasing new music after his 38 Baby 2 project. 

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Alas, rappers have long treated retirement like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, often leaving audiences apathetic at the news — after all, they always come back, do they not? Yet for YoungBoy, there seems to be smoke surrounding this particular fire. Akademiks, who has become a de facto conduit for the young generation, took a moment to speak with the Baton Rouge rapper during his personal crisis.

Ak confirms that YoungBoy is not only going through with his hiatus, but also pulling the plug on 38 Baby 2’s initially planned Friday release date — that’s not to say the delay is indefinite, but it should be noted that YoungBoy did not provide an alternative. As Ak explains, YoungBoy has decided to take a break from recording and releasing any new music, committing whole hog to the social-media embargo; however, men have been pulled back into the tortured fields they left behind for years, and it remains to be seen if YoungBoy will be able to resist the siren’s song of twisted social media debauchery.