A Boogie wit da Hoodie

In an interview with Apple Music around the release of his 2020 album, Artist 2.0, Bronx-born rapper A Boogie wit da Hoodie described the liberation of changing things up. “It gets crazy when you experiment on your sound,” he says. “That’s when it gets interesting. And that’s why I was like, damn, people should really try this shit and have fun with their art. It’s not even music at the end of the day—it’s art, because people visualize in their head when they’re listening to it.” Born Artist Dubose in 1995, A Boogie—a nickname adopted, in part, from the 2002 movie Paid in Full—started rapping in that fertile, post-Drake, post-Future-and-Young Thug era when distinctions between divergent attitudes in rap—bars vs. melody, street vs. pop—blurred to their breaking point. His releases—from 2016’s debut, Artist, to 2024’s Better Off Alone—don’t chart a course for hip-hop so much as leave a footprint: By the time he did it, he’s got something else on his mind.