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Artist
Young Hootie
12+ albums
bestrapcompton2pacblood
about
You might not know it to look at him, but up-and-coming rapper Young Hootie has seen a lot. Born on the West Side of Compton to a family hit hard by the crack cocaine epidemic that swept the Black community in the mid-eighties, Hootie speaks with keen insight and powerful authority about things that half of the rappers in today’s appearance-oriented game can only pretend that they know. Hootie, however, is a real brother whether he’s in front of the mic or on the block. As he says, “I came up on the block, listening to Tupac, with hood niggas as role models. That’s what I knew, so that’s what I lived. You can’t really tell, but I’m that nigga who would knock somebody’s head off.” Despite the pressures of ghetto life, however, Hootie, who first saw the inside of a cell at age 14 for gun charges, never let his game fall in the streets or in the classroom. Surrounded by gang violence and himself being involved with the Bloods since his middle school days, Young Hootie had colleges knocking at his door before he eventually accepted an invitation to study Business at the most prestigious historically Black university in the nation, Morehouse. While Hootie may be able to boast that he draws his lyrical material from a lifetime of harsh reality and lessons learned in the streets, there is one almost universal quality that he doesn’t share with about 90% of rappers out there; that is, failure.“The first 16 bars I ever spit,” he reveals, “people loved it.” Only three years ago, at
