Yungen Brings It Home With ‘Away Games’
Rap music has its own inherent connotations that may seem to suggest you need to be from the streets to be ‘Real’. But in real life, most just wanna live life and have fun. After all, it’s all entertainment, right? These rappers aren’t really punching man up and bursing their gun, just like Daniel Craig isn’t jumping into buildings and taking off mans head with sniper rifles. Like movie characters, rap characters are often designed to entertain.
For those people who don’t understand this, it’s because they’re really about the life that rappers rap about and believe in getting stripes by initiating altercations as a way to prove who’s the real badman on road. But for someone who’s become associated with the street life, Yungen isn’t actually a gangster rapper, he may be cheeky, but he’s not known for being ‘roadman’. No doubt he’s been through some crazy things in his life, he’s got ties in the streets but his music isn’t predominantly about that life.
Man said I ran away and I lost my balls / Like I’m supposed to fight Hulk and his friends like a fool — Yungen, Away Games
A recent video went viral, when Yungen got confronted by a man who looked like he’d spent bare time in the gym, and to no surprise Yungen took to the road and ran away from it. See, this kind of madness is happening more and more and filming altercations with the intention of giving the ‘street life’ some sort of exposure is also prompting people on social media to act like they would’ve done something different. But, lets be honest, most people would run or be overcome with fear to do anything else as Chuckie suggested on the latest episode of HalfCast.
Good artists create art based on their experience and true to form, Yungen got into the studio, grabbed long time collaborator Kaylum Dennis and filmed a video ‘Away Games’ to address that recent event.
The track isn’t designed to give insight into why he chose to run, it’s Yungen firing back putting his lyrical ability on display and showing he’s a rapper who can drop witty punchlines for days. Personally, maybe something in the vein of ‘Off the Record 2’ would’ve worked better for this situation, putting distance between the perils of the roads and the work he’s putting in for himself and his family. But I can understand why Yungen chose the bravado route in this freestyle.
You’re not a badman coz you robbed someone fam? You’re just poor & brave — JME, 96 Fuckries
Choosing to remove himself from a situation that could’ve gone wrong real quick doesn’t put his masculinity into question and with the recent tragic death of Showkey, that might be the smarter thing to do on the street these days. Focusing on his rapping, Yungen gives a lot to decipher with some subliminal bars that may still get people tweeting on whether Yungen’s just stirring the beef pot but hey, that’s the rap game.
