The Compton rapper YG Shatters, who has made a name for himself on adult contemporary rap from West Coast anthems to unflinching street narratives, recently ventured into unfamiliar but deeply personal terrain. In an emotion-fueled interview with Rocsi Diaz for ABC News, YG admitted that a grown woman sexually preyed on him as a child when he was only 14. The revelation was not delivered in a press release or a social media post but through a song.
On his single "2004," which he released in March, YG gets the count started early: "When I was young, I got raped / By a b#### that was twice my age / Picked me up from school / Took me to hers and got laid."
Until the song came out, nobody in his circle at YG knew what he'd gone through, not even his family. "I kept it inside," he said. "My parents, the first they heard of that was when the record came out.
But what happened next might be even more surprising than the admission. When YG started passing the song around to others, he discovered a heartbreaking and revealing pattern.
"Ninety percent of the people I played it for, the men, the males, all got the same little stories," he says. "That was the conversation everyone was having, but it was such as, 'Fine, since I, like, was sexually abused and stuff.' And it's like, 'Yeah , but for us, we men, so it ain't treated the same way.'"
That line alone lets out a raw truth about masculinity and trauma: how boys are taught to put on armor early or to see abuse as initiation or conquest rather than what it is trauma. YG said that when he was a teenager, he didn't even realize what happened to him had been abuse. "I got raped," he said point-blank, finally acknowledging what had long been years of silent confusion.
It's a reminder that rappers, even ones draped in tattoos and street cred, bear invisible wounds. YG isn't just adding a track to his discography but adding his voice to a conversation too many men are still afraid to have.
"People put me in the box," he told Diaz." They know us as gang members … so they look at us like, 'Oh, we gang members, we animals, we not human. And it's like, bro, I'm a human being. I experience real-life stuff beyond the street stuff."
The influence of "2004" is already guiding his next album in a more serious direction. "Just people's reaction; this shit's been good for me," YG added. "Cause I got me talking deeper on the album … I got more shit I want to talk about.
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