Left, Right: YG and His Light-Shit-On-Fire, Smack-Somebody-Up Debut Record 'My Krazy Life'

It’s 3am on a Thursday night, and I’m standing on a balcony at Webster Hall watching YG, clad in Timbs, white tee, and red flannel, plus maybe 50 of his friends stand around listening to the best parts of YG’s My Krazy Life, which turned one whole week old yesterday. Nominally a concert to celebrate the release of his long-awaited debut record, it’s mainly a chance for YG and his boys to further emphasize the fact that they’ve truly made it. He’s not performing in the traditional sense of the word as much as he’s screaming, along with the rest of the crowd, over his own hits. TY Dolla Sign comes out onstage, singing the hook to his and YG’s early hit “Toot It and Boot It,” the weirdly feel-good hit-it-and-quit-it anthem that first put him on the map. Juelz Santana comes onstage to yell, “WHOAAAAAH” a couple times before fading into the back of the mob, which is probably the best thing Juelz Santana can do in 2014. Still, people are losing. Their. Shit. From the top bannister, there’s a sea of people bobbing up and down, doing that invisible pull-ups dance that people tend to do at rap shows, dancing along, egged along in their frenzy by those on stage. It truly feels like a moment of shared release between performer and crowd, an increasingly rare connection that transcends the fact that YG’s up there barely rapping along to his own shit. DJ Mustard, often hailed as the Dr. Dre to YG’s Snoop, starts spinning whatever he feels like, and slowly, YG and his crew dissipate, trickling offstage. It’s a half-assed performance, but at this point nobody’s asking YG to perform with his whole ass. Seeing him in the flesh is good enough.

People have written up and down about what makes My Krazy Life such a refreshing album, but this is hip-hop we’re dealing with, not rocket science. The shit just sounds good. It’s one of those records I’d send to an alien if I were trying to explain to them what rap sounds like in 2014. It rewards repeated listens. You can zoom in and pay attention to it, or you can just throw it on in the background and party. Parts of it sound so tough that you’ll want to karate chop through an 18-wheeler and then set it on fire then rob somebody. At the end of it all, you’re left with a strong sense of who YG is—where he comes from, what he cares about, and where he’s going. And more important than that, it’s fun as hell.

Kenan DuQuan Ray Motherfuckin’ Jackson is his name. He’s from B.P.T., West Side L.A., 400 Spruce Street to be exact. Robbing houses is his hustle, he claims Blood, and he’s got one hell of a complicated relationship with his mom. Welcome to Bompton, home of YG, pioneer of ratchet (though he bristles at the term), and the newest candidate for the leader of the new gangster rap revolution.

What makes My Krazy Life so immediately intriguing isn’t just the production—though we’ll get to that later—it’s how YG presents himself, as an everydude gangbanger whose reality speaks to the realities of growing up poor in Los Angeles. He plays the cocky, rambunctious troublemaker, loyal to a fault but still scared, unsure of his place in the world. He’s a gangster, sure—“Bicken Back Bein Bool” ensures you walk away from the record with knowledge of his Blood affiliations—but more in the sense that he needs some sort of structure with a dad in jail, and he wants loyalty and protection. He knows his place in rap history, too. “1AM” is essentially a rewrite of UGK’s “3 in the Mornin’,” while he checks Dr. Dre on “B.P.T.,” Tupac’s flow on “I Just Wanna Party,” C-Murder on “My Niggas,” and his homie Big TC starts his solo shot/interlude “Thank God” by rapping, “I’m sorry Miss Jaaaackson,” whose origins I don’t need to tell you.

There’s a vulnerability in YG’s voice, a sense of urgency imbued within each bar that lets you know he might be a little in over his head. He’s awkwardly honest and sweet, especially when he loses an argument with his mom or admits to waking up lonely with a boner, or Boosie-ianly masturbating in jail because his girl’s not interested in visiting him. The most impressive song on the record is “Meet the Flockers,” essentially the Ten Crack Commandments of the good ol’ B&E. Because 2014 rap album-making is all about #narrative #continuity, YG enters the house sans gloves, ignoring his buddy’s command to wear his socks on his hands. It’s revealed in “Thank God” that YG eventually gets picked up for leaving fingerprints in the residence he broke into on “Meet the Flockers.” YG and his homies talk a big game, but when he gets locked up they can only scrape together $2,000 of the necessary five stacks for bail.

This wouldn’t be a major label rap album without heavyweight guests, so YG trots out the usual heavy-hitters such as Schoolboy Q, Young Jeezy (who executive-produced the album), Drake, and Kendrick Lamar. However, instead of stealing the show, each rapper slips into his role, playing a perfect supporting character before bowing out—think Matthew McCaughnahey’s turn as the batshit-insane stockbroker in Wolf of Wall Street, showing the young gun how it’s done before ceding the spotlight.

None of this would work without the sonic backbone provided by DJ Mustard, who has a hand in eight of the album’s 14 tracks, and whose blueprints—steady rhythms, finger snaps, the same four piano keys—looms heavily over the rest of the record. Though Mustard’s drawn Derek Zoolander-like criticism for making the same beat over and over, here he stretches his formula, creating a sonic world that mirrors YG’s own. It’s not that he’s suddenly realized a beat can have more than two notes on it, but he’s experimenting with different tempos, bringing in surprising elements such as the violin on “Left, Right” and playing church bells against Casio armpit farts in “My Nigga,” which in turn follows the same formula as “Bicken Back Bein’ Bool” despite sounding completely different. The finest trick Mustard accomplishes here is “Who Do You Love,” taking the Boosie song of the same name and throwing it through a quantizer, robbing it of all swing but imbuing it with a sense of pop invincibility. Such is the DJ Mustard formula: a bit of hyphy, a bit of the classic southern club sound, scrubbed clean and stripped of all unnecessary elements. Such negative space can be intimidating—plenty of room to hide inside of a lush Mike Will instrumental; here, not so much—but YG and his collaborators allow the spare beats to bring out the best in themselves.

With a certified shit-hot album under his belt, the world is YG’s oyster. Something tells me that though he’s nicked the structure of Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city, he has little desire to be the sort of pop culture force that Kendrick is. Hip-Hop has its kings, and YG is probably not destined to be one of them. But I don’t think he minds. He just wants to party.

Drew Millard's Bank of America account has four figures on a good day. He's on Twitter - @drewmillard