The Pop Corporation

“When I was young, I got raped by a bitch twice my age.”

The opening line to YG’s recent single ‘2004’ there, to almost zero column inches or thought. While music journalism focused once again on Kanye’s latest implosion, Kneecap’s politics and gamely filling up pages with Korean pop in the hope to grab some international, viral traffic, YG’s important message has already become a footnote.

Of course, there are some who might argue that YG isn’t a household name and it may have simply slipped through the cracks – however, smaller artists in other music circles have garnered a lot of attention for having the bravery to deal with difficult topics like this. Besides, it’s not like YG hasn’t already racked up streaming stats with tracks into the hundreds-of-millions, is it?

The track itself, is straight-talking and at times, difficult to listen to. Even in 2025, we see YG almost shrugging it off, because-fuck-it-that’s-why.

In one breath, he’s saying “ever since that day, I never looked at shit the same” and “just think before the next time you start asking why is you like that? Why is you savage? Why every ho you fuck with, it’s never long-lasting? No access to my heart, I give no passage – a bitch took advantage of me, I ain’t got no trust – the bitch took advantage of me“; the next “I went to the homies and we talked about it – they thought exotic – that was they only thoughts about it“, and “Got took advantage of and I liked it, so what? Y’all call that sex abuse shit – I just thought she was doin’ some cool shit… the bitch probably would’ve been up on the news clip.“

It’d be easy to take on the dismissal from YG and just think ‘life is like that sometimes’, but it’s pretty obvious that YG’s straight-shooting on this, is evidence of how he managed to navigate the world after being sexually assaulted by a woman who had a niece he went to school with.

Coping mechanisms we’d say, wringing our hands – YG, having lived it and having to deal with it, coming straight back at you with: “I ain’t wanna spill the tea, so I just let her go, ’cause me and the auntie kept fuckin’ for sure – and, oh, one day, I felt like this was too much – I knew this wasn’t regular as I grew up.“

It is easy to not look beyond the hard-as-nails exterior of a rapper and clutch your pearls if you’re not fully listening, but the trauma of young men in the US and elsewhere is seldom addressed in music criticism. After such a stark opening line, you almost gloss over the current insanity of YG’s life. He states: “Fucked up, yeah, I know – how fucked up could it go? Nipsey left me like how Biggie left Hov and Slim got his life stole. Tellin’ myself I’ll be alright though, shit really fuckin’ with my cycle – my lil’ bitch lost her life gettin’ lipo’.“

All this, and he’s also telling us about statutory rape which made him throw up as a child after one encounter. Sure, it may sound like he’s shrugging it off, but of course he is. His life has been chaotic, hard, violent – what else you expecting him to do? It’s a lot to take in, so of course YG has sidestepped the usual formula of confessing all over a piano-and-strings Thoughtful Beat we’ve seen a hundred times elsewhere.

It puts into sharp relief just how at ease we all are when we’re bopping to a track about someone losing their homies and family members too. So many have been listening, but did they hear?

By the time the chorus hits: “They tell me, “Don’t worry,” they ask me if I’m okay. Motherfuckers don’t deserve me, not even on my worst day. This life shit crazy, grew up at a young age
Oh, babe, why you had to hurt me?“

Despite all this, the traction the track has been getting is borderline minimal. YG appears in the video looking for all the world like someone who thinks it was cool to be taken advantage of, allowing himself to have it slowly dawn on him about what actually happened. The arresting thing is that YG just lets the awkwardness of the whole thing hang in the air, almost to say ‘I’ve been dealing with this longer than my adult life – now you fuckin’ deal with the conversation around it.’

Joe Budden, at least, sat down and talked about it, while the rest of the media at large stayed pretty quiet, even if they could’ve gone deeper and not stuck on surface level chat.

While Kendrick’s ‘Mr Morale’ saw the kind of praise which saw him hailed as a generational talent, and the trauma that haunts Black adult life, and rightly so. However, there’s still a very thorny issue of the way sexual violence is dealt with when men are talking about it – especially when one of the coping mechanisms is to shrug with a tough exterior.

Another that completely slipped everyone’s attention was ASAP Ferg on ‘Pool’, where he delivered this verse:

At ten, I was drowning, touch when I was in the pool
All the breath left my body where I couldn’t move
Violated, hand on my private by a bigger dude
Seconds felt like forever, really wasn’t cool
When he seen me ’round the block, he’d smile and laugh
As if we had a little secret, and I hated that

And here we are, looking down YG’s barrel of ‘2004’, and the extraordinary braver to tackle a conversation in a manner we haven’t seen spoken about in such a direct manner frequently enough.

Given that a lot of issues like this reportedly lead to isolation, backlash, and of course, re-traumatisation, it makes the opening line of ‘2004’ land twice as hard. There’s been studies that suggest that men’s issues in this instance have been minimised in therapy settings, so is it any wonder that young men with a shared experience of this would have to look to their idols in the hope that they’ll speak about it. YG has done exactly that, a coupled it with the less-than-perfect way he’s had to deal with it.

Are we too naive to hope that this is the start of an honest conversation which will help young men who have fallen foul of such behaviour, and unravel the mess that springs from it?