Music
Flat Out with Young Don
The 17-year-old Baltimore rapper's charisma, skill, and deep sense of self suggests that there's a bright future ahead of him.
On a mid-July Saturday afternoon in West Baltimore, 17-year-old rapper Young Don sits on his aunt’s porch accompanied by his manager Lamont, his older cousin, and a couple of childhood friends playing his favorite sport: a game of craps. “Shooting the dice, my favorite number 8. That’s the only number that I’m gonna bet straight,” is how he professed his love for his lucky strike point in this year’s “Don’t Want the Bitch.” While we sit on the porch, 8 (and side bets of landing on 6 in pursuit of hitting 8 again) has been the source of his wad of cash getting fatter in real time. So the lyric actually checks out. “You see I just bucked it. I hope y’all got that on camera,” he says smiling while counting his money. The musical mention of his point of choice probably feels small to most, but it underscores Don’s most admirable skill: giving acute detail of the pleasures and pain that he’s experienced in his young life.
Young Don
© Shan Wallace
Though he’s just 17, the West Baltimore native has been rapping since his elementary school days and it’s arguable that he’s more technically sound than a lot of his street rap peers throughout the Baltimore/DMV region because of it. “That rapping shit was just a little habit of mine. A little something that I liked to do,” he says nonchalantly, his upper body leaning over the railing of his aunt’s porch while he looks off into the distance. Don — or Pop, as his friends and family call him — has gained a considerable following in the region over the past year, but he talks as if he’s been groomed for this moment. In a way, he was. As a young child, his dad would take him around the city where his friends would engage in friendly rap battles. Knowing that Don had the skills, he’d place him on the spot to rhyme in front of the adults. “It used to be hella niggas on the block but I’d still freestyle,” he says with an assured smile. “He’d be like ‘Yeah, my son aint shy neither.’ Ever since then I started writing for real.” When Don was just 11, his dad passed away, but their unbreakable bond, which was strengthened by music, is what has pushed him to persist and excel beyond his years. “Rest In Peace to my father, I do all this shit for him,” he says. “If he was here, he’d be backing me.”
If you search for “Lor Pop” on YouTube — the name he went by before Young Don — you’ll come across a handful of songs and videos of him at an elementary school age. With chubby cheeks, a baby face, and a prepubescent voice, you may be shocked to find that his lyrical content at that time did not deviate much from what it is now: violence, drugs, sex, and the consequences of life on the street. To say it’s an uncomfortable watch at times would be modestly put, but what those flashbacks succeed at is making you want to know more about his story. The music he's put out in the past two years answers those questions and, in the process, have made Young Don one of the most beloved teen rappers in the DMV region.
Young Don
© Shan Wallace
On 2019’s “Can’t Hold It In” he rapped about the severity of living with intention, especially after losing so many close to him at a young age. Later that year, on “Still” from his "Smoke Cleared I’m Here" EP, he goes into some things that have been eating at him of late. “They killed my father I feel like I got my heart stole / That shit been driving a young nigga down a dark road / But I’ma try to take it easy ‘cause I know this shit ain’t easy,” he raps before further touching on the effects of trauma that he deals with on a regular basis. And on this year’s “Get Inside,” he recounts the events that led up to him being shot in early 2020. Those first-hand experiences, though tragic, are part of the reason why Don has been able to garner an abundance of loyal listeners within the region and beyond. His music isn't just filled with empty one-liners about money and possessions he doesn’t have. It’s from the soil. But it’s also his versatility that makes him a fan favorite. He’s proven to be formidable on UK drill beats (“Get Clipped”), tag teamed with No Savage who’s arguably the hottest rapper in neighboring DC (“Through the City”) and has a handle on how to make catchy melodic bangers (“Insta Killer”).
But what’s most promising about Young Don is his self-awareness and how he views himself on the world stage. You’d be hard pressed to hear him refer to himself as a Baltimore rapper, or a DMV rapper and that’s because he sees himself as something bigger than where he’s from. “Of course a nigga be having a mindset like, ‘Yeah I’ma make millions.’ But you don’t know how to really do it. Like what it take to get there. I know what that shit take. It take a lot,” he says. But he assures that he’s prepared to do whatever it takes to get to that place.
Already, he’s had endorsements by some of the region’s brightest stars like Shy Glizzy who first caught wind of him during an Instagram Live session in which Don out rapped everyone else signed on. And, according to his management, he’s already begun to be courted by major labels on a weekly basis. “Everybody might not support but everybody definitely seeing my shit, so that’s all that matters,” he says with a grin while sitting on the porch steps. While we sit, a car rides by blasting his music without even knowing he’s a few feet away. “Love it or hate it, they gon’ have to turn that shit off to hate it. ‘Cause if you keep it on, you gon love it. You feel me?”
