With hair that looks like red-hot cheese curls and the wild Atlanta ATLien style to match, Miles McCollum -- best known as singer/rapper and Sailing Team leader Lil Yachty -- bounces between the feel-good positivity of D.R.A.M. and the druggy weirdness of Future with the greatest of ease. Part of this is due to the use of two personas, the wild Lil Yachty and the stern but strange MC Lil Boat. He began to break in 2015 when Drake's OVO Sound Radio show aired his bizarre, singsongy number "Minnesota." In early 2016, his other persona became the name of Lil Boat, his debut for the Capitol- and Motown-affiliated independent Quality Control. The mixtape featured "Minnesota" along with "One Night," a woozy party cut that reached number 30 on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart and cracked the Hot 100. An appearance at Kanye West's Yeezy Season 3 fashion show followed soon after, along with an appearance on Chance the Rapper's Top Ten mixtape Coloring Book. A second Quality Control mixtape, Summer Songs 2, arrived that August and debuted on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart at number 44. By the end of the year, Yachty scored a hit with D.R.A.M.'s playful "Broccoli," which peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart, and was nominated for a Grammy award. Featured appearances on tracks by Charli XCX, Kyle (the Top Five pop hit "iSpy"), and Tee Grizzley, along with a Carly Rae Jepsen collaboration on a remake of Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock's "It Takes Two," preceded the May 2017 release of Teenage Emotions, the first proper Yachty album.
David Jeffries
AllMusic.com
