The 2010s File Feature
Hate Me
"Hate Me" — Trippie Redd and YoungBoy Never Broke Again's 2019 Dispatch December 2019 was a moment when the emo-rap and trap-influenced melodic hip-hop that …
01 The Story
"Hate Me" — Trippie Redd and YoungBoy Never Broke Again's 2019 Dispatch
December 2019 was a moment when the emo-rap and trap-influenced melodic hip-hop that had been building throughout the decade was at or near its commercial peak. Trippie Redd had established himself as one of the more distinctive voices in this space, with an approach to pitch and melody that was more chaotic and emotionally raw than most of his contemporaries. YoungBoy Never Broke Again had built an extraordinary streaming presence, particularly on YouTube, that made him one of the most listened-to artists in America even while significant portions of the industry remained uncertain about his commercial ceiling. Their collaboration on "Hate Me" brought together two artists who were, in different ways, defining the sonic margins of late 2010s hip-hop.
Trippie Redd's Identity
Trippie Redd emerged from the Atlanta hip-hop ecosystem in the mid-2010s with a sound that was deliberately difficult to categorize. His vocal approach mixed rap delivery with melodic singing in ways that were more extreme than the "mumble rap" designation suggested: he was genuinely interested in melody and in the kind of emotional rawness that punk and emo music had always trafficked in, and he applied those interests to a trap production context in ways that felt genuinely new. His commercial profile was built significantly through streaming platforms, where his music found a dedicated audience among listeners who prized emotional intensity and sonic texture over lyrical precision.
YoungBoy Never Broke Again's Reach
YoungBoy Never Broke Again (NBA YoungBoy) had accumulated streaming numbers by 2019 that put him in the company of the genre's biggest stars, even while his mainstream commercial profile remained somewhat below his actual listener numbers. His output was prodigious and his audience intensely loyal. The streaming landscape's emphasis on consistent release rather than concentrated promotional cycles suited his approach perfectly, and his YouTube channel in particular had amassed view counts that demonstrated the depth of his fanbase's engagement with his music.
One Week at 84
The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 7, 2019, at position 84, which was also its only week on the chart. One week on the Hot 100, debuting and peaking at number 84 on December 7, 2019: the characteristic result of a streaming-era album or mixtape track that generates initial download and stream activity without the sustained promotional support that extends chart presence. Both artists had been releasing music at a rapid pace in the period surrounding this collaboration, which meant that audience attention was distributed across multiple releases simultaneously rather than concentrated on any single track.
The Emo-Rap Moment
The late 2010s produced a distinctive wave of hip-hop that drew heavily on emo and punk influences in both its aesthetic sensibility and its emotional content. Songs about heartbreak, depression, and interpersonal conflict delivered with the melodic intensity of emotional hardcore, set over trap beats: this was the environment in which Trippie Redd and YoungBoy were both developing. A collaboration built around the theme of being hated fit precisely within this emotional vocabulary, addressing the specific kind of defiant self-pity that was one of the genre's most commercially reliable emotional registers.
The Collaboration's Commercial Logic
In the streaming era, collaborations between artists with overlapping but non-identical audiences serve a specific commercial function: they expose each artist's work to the other's fanbase, potentially generating cross-audience streaming activity that benefits both parties. The Trippie-YoungBoy combination brought together two artists with substantial but somewhat distinct fan communities, and the collaboration's brief chart appearance reflects the initial cross-pollination effect of that combination without the sustained single-track focus that a major commercial single would have required to extend the chart presence.
Find this one in the catalog and hear two of late 2019's most emotionally direct voices working together.
"Hate Me" — Trippie Redd Featuring YoungBoy Never Broke Again's singular moment on the 2010s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Defiance in the Title: What "Hate Me" Means
The invitation to hate is a specific emotional gesture that runs through emo, punk, and their various hip-hop descendants. It combines defiance with vulnerability in a way that is characteristic of the emo tradition: the narrator acknowledges that they are hated, accepts it, and presents that acceptance as its own form of strength. When Trippie Redd and YoungBoy Never Broke Again deploy this gesture, they are working within a tradition that has been building emotional intensity around this specific combination of feelings for decades.
Hatred as a Form of Recognition
There is a paradox in the experience of being hated: it requires that the person who hates you has noticed you, thought about you, directed emotional energy toward you. In the world of social media visibility that both artists inhabit, where attention is the primary currency of cultural existence, even negative attention is a form of acknowledgment. The song's title positions hatred as something that can be embraced precisely because it is evidence of impact, of occupying enough space in someone else's consciousness to provoke a strong reaction. This is a psychologically coherent response to the specific economics of contemporary fame.
Emotional Rawness as Artistic Value
The emo-rap tradition that Trippie Redd helped define values emotional rawness over polish. The ideal performance in this mode is one that sounds like it might fall apart, where the delivery of feeling takes precedence over technical precision. This rawness signals authenticity in the way that the genre's audience understands the term: not biographical accuracy but emotional genuineness, the sense that what is being expressed is real feeling rather than constructed persona. The genre's listeners have developed sophisticated ability to distinguish between these two things.
The Generational Context
The emotional vocabulary of late 2010s hip-hop reflected a generation's relationship to a specific set of cultural conditions: intense social media exposure, the erosion of privacy, the normalization of emotional extremity as performance, and the particular kinds of social anxiety that accompany growing up in a continuously documented public life. Songs about being hated and not caring are responsive to this context, offering a way of relating to public hostility that is more functional than fragility: if you claim to welcome the hate, you deprive it of its intended effect.
Two Voices, Overlapping Territories
The collaboration between Trippie Redd and YoungBoy Never Broke Again brought together two artists whose distinct approaches to melodic hip-hop found common ground in the emotional territory the song occupied. Their voices carry different textures and come from different geographic and stylistic traditions, but both operate in the space between rap and singing that the emo-rap moment made commercially viable. That shared territory gives the collaboration a genuine musical coherence rather than the feeling of two strangers forced together by label strategy. The emotional alignment of their approaches makes the collaboration sound like an artistic choice rather than a commercial calculation.
The Streaming Single's Different Lifecycle
A song like this one, which generates significant initial streaming activity and then sustains a dedicated following without necessarily maintaining chart presence, has a different kind of commercial life than the chart history alone suggests. The single-week chart appearance is the beginning of the story, not the end: the track continues to accumulate streams, to appear in playlists, to find new listeners through the algorithmic recommendations that the streaming platforms build around artists' existing audiences. The chart position captures one moment in that ongoing process.
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