In an interview posted on his YouTube account prior to the release of his seventh album, The Gentlemen’s Club, YG recalled a conversation he had with Kendrick Lamar about the importance of quality control. “I’m telling him about what I was doing, like putting out albums just to get out the deal ’cause my deal [with Def Jam] was fucked up,” he told his interviewer, DJ Hed (YG is now signed with 10K Projects through his 4Hunnid imprint). “[Kendrick] was like, ‘Bro, you ain’t never supposed to do that. You gotta give it your all every time.’”
Indeed, The Gentlemen’s Club signals a renewed focus on building narratives with his distinctively aggressive Bompton persona. It evokes his famed run from over a decade ago, when the rapper rose to stardom with 2014’s My Krazy Life and 2016’s Still Brazy by revitalizing the kind of street-conscious perspectives that the West Coast has long produced, from Ice Cube to the late Nipsey Hussle (who co-starred with YG on his deathless anti-Trump anthem “FDT”). But YG hasn’t scored a major Billboard hit since 2018’s “Big Bank.” His music in recent years has been typified by high-carb, low-nutrition radio bait like “Go Loko,” a bizarre number where he and Tyga shuffle along with Speedy Gonzales-styled accents, and “Toxic,” which lifts Mary J. Blige’s “Be Happy” nearly wholesale. (To be fair, his 2019 “Slide” collaboration with H.E.R. is romantic and enchanting.) In 2025, YG signaled a return to less irrelevant work with “2004,” a startling confession where he reveals he was sexually assaulted at 14 by a woman older than him. “Ever since that day, I’ve never looked at shit the same,” he rapped. Yet the stakes around his career can’t help but feel lower now.
“2004” and its brave admission of childhood trauma set the stage for The Gentlemen’s Club. More than a tired signifier of strip clubs, it imagines a place where men can unburden themselves and share secrets free of judgement. “Think of this club as a place men go when they’re ready to talk. Talk about things you’d never expect us to…Uncomfortable things,” says an unnamed narrator near the end of The Gentlemen’s Club penultimate track, “Insecure.” YG knows that he’s no longer the fresh-faced young gangsta that emerged nationally during L.A.’s short-lived but memorable “jerkin’” dance scene with the 2010 hit “Toot It and Boot It.” At 36, he has a family to support and a “couple of M’s” in the safe. He’s probably too young to be in an actual “Mid Life Crisis,” as he claims at one point. But he effectively conveys how difficult it is to evolve out of the hedonistic life he led as a thugged-out rap star “with a six-pack” and plenty of women to service him. “Hella young, gettin’ fucked up, the drugs had my mind/The plug had my mind/The club had my mind/The Treetop Pirus and the Bloods had my mind,” he raps on “Writing My Wrongs,” which closes with a soulful chorus by the singer Ogi.
The Gentlemen’s Club opens with an “Intro,” where YG brags that he’s “still in it strong,” and “OMG,” which find him and Pusha T lyrically lavishing praise on themselves. On the chorus to “Kudos,” he admits, “Kudos to everything that made me/But lately, everything I ain’t into.” But then he says, weirdly, that “These niggas tryin’ to be like a nigga/I’m tryin’ to be like a white motherfucker with figures.” Is that all there is to life as a Black man: aspiring to collect as much money as a (white) billionaire?
Thankfully, YG doesn’t turn The Gentlemen’s Club into a wealth-building fantasy. But it takes a few songs to hit his stride, even as he unfurls an awkward story rap about murdering one’s dual identity (“Hitman”) and whispers about sexual pleasure alongside Tyler, the Creator with “On the Low,” a track inspired by Ying Yang Twins’ 2005 classic “Wait (The Whisper Song).” The album finally picks up with “We Know the Truth,” and YG finally responding to persistent rumors that he paid for Drakeo the Ruler’s murder at the Once Upon a Time in LA festival in 2021. (YG, who beefed with Drakeo for years beforehand, was a co-headliner.) “I got paid six hundred (thousand) for that show/So why would I tell a nigga to fuck it up, though,” he argues. “I came to get the dough, was finna hit the stage/Then I heard like y’all heard, somebody got hit with a blade.” That song is followed by “Hollywood,” a slapper with an Eighties funk bounce featuring Shoreline Mafia. The two tracks display YG at his best, attacking his haters with passion and unafraid to name names, then cranking up a “drankin’, smokin’, fuckin’” jam to lighten the tension.
It remains to be seen what listeners will think of “Tiffany,” a story-rap that begins with a drunken man named “Chris” picking up a “freak” at the club and taking her home, only to take off her clothes and discover she’s trans. Produced by Ty Dolla $ign and “Damn James” Royo, the beat switches from a nighttime vibe to light and comical as YG says “trans woman,” as if he’s poking fun at the hapless character he has given voice to. The story continues with Chris plotting to murder Tiffany and showing up at her house with a loaded gun. But YG allows Tiffany a bit of humanity at the end. “I struggle with identity and fear of being judged,” he raps, imagining her sobbing, desperate voice. “I’m they, I’m them, not a girl, not a stud/I just want to be loved…please don’t do it, I’m not perfect.” “Tiffany” is reminiscent of Lamar’s highly controversial “Auntie Diaries,” another track where a Black cisgender man struggled to empathize with nonbinary people without centering his own prejudices.
YG makes a spectacle of struggling with himself throughout The Gentlemen’s Club, and even mimics suicide on the final track, “Mid Life Crisis,” as the unnamed narrator says, “The man he was had to die before the man he is today could finally live.” Yet that wouldn’t mean much to the listener without quality numbers to enjoy like “Hollywood,” the vibe-y trapsoul of “Dinner Dates and Heartbreaks,” and “Insecure,” a cipher with J.I.D. and Ab-Soul. YG wants to convince us that he’s pushing himself and trying to be a better man. “Look inwards, fuck the pride in you,” he raps on “Hitman (Reprise).” But all we want is for him to keep growing and evolving as an artist. The Gentlemen’s Club, for all its odd and difficult convulsions, is a heartening step in a positive direction. It should be all he needs to embrace himself once more.
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.