YOUNG DOLPH
the tragic king of affirmation
iNTRODUCTiON
Would 22 MiLL be enough to buy YOUR SOUL?
The answer was NO for Young Dolph. His creative control was PRiCELESS to him. Too bad the true price would be his LiFE.
But if we can glean anything from Dolph’s art, he thought this a FAiR DEAL.
After all he was the KiNG OF MEMPHiS.
The Tennesseean city named after the ancient Egyptian kingdom of the dead. The border city between life and the afterlife. A place that bred a lineage of kingship and danger. Atop the throne in Memphis, Egypt was Ptah—a deity that created the world—his world—with nothing more than words. Yet even as the ruling monarch, Ptah lived a paranoid existence.
Check the comments of any Young Dolph interview, song or photo. You’ll see new ones pop up everyday. Almost four years to his passing, he remains an iCON to all those who HUSTLE. And how could he not be? As Dolph himself said, he turned “DiRT into DiAMONDS.” Simply with his speech, self belief and tolerance for the ultimate risk.
However he serves as a cautionary tale that supersonic triumph balances out with an equally rapid descent. No matter how many times you may escape death—you cannot outrun your destiny. Success puts a target on your back, especially when you taunt the WiCKED.
There is comfort in knowing Dolph was aware of his FAUSTiAN BARGAiN, and alchemized as much of the negative energy he could into cold hard cash—for him, his inner circle and the good people of his hometown.
Most importantly—as inspiration for the ages.
BACKGROUND
This piece was borne out of another media analysis TikTok I made that was well received.
In listening to the chorus of FAST, I realized how much Young Dolph had influenced my first rise to success. But also how he left me spiritually unequipped for the inevitable downfall. This time I head to the top as a wiser man,——still driven, still relentless, but with a truer, freer, more sustainable foundation.
Young Dolph is the king of using affirmation as self-defense. He is the epitome of self-mythology as survival and embracing danger and recklessness to fuel your ascension.
LYRiC ANALYSiS
So we’re going to look at the chorus of “FAST” off the album Rich Slave. And I’m gonna get a little personal with this one because Young Dolph was one of the key parts of my soundtrack when I was in a really tough part of my life, when I was grinding and hustling for something. And he was with me all the way through the come up and then even being at the top and also realizing a lot of emptiness and what I had lost. So let’s get into the song.
I wake up every day and live it
Like it’s gonna be my last
I been laughin’ to the bank so
Much it got them suckers mad
I got a billion dollar future
Fuck yesterday and the past
Every time my girl get mad at me
I go buy her a bag (Woah)
Lambo (Lambo) , fast (Go)
My ice (Hittin’) , glass (Woo)
Old school (Hot rod) , smash (Skrrt)
Almost (What?) , crashed (Damn)
Balmains sag (Racks) my bitch, bad (Bad)
I fuck her ‘til she go to sleep
Every time she mad (Mad)
Before we even get into the words of that song, just sonically, that song is pure adrenaline. That’s pure go-getter energy. It’s literally like coffee in the morning. I think at one point that song was really my alarm clock. So now let’s actually break it down.
CLASS is in SESSiON.
Young Dolph represents that lineage of American capitalistic affirmation. And it’s reckless. It’s all about hyper-acceleration, getting things as fast as you can and blowing them as fast as you get them.
So you can go out tomorrow and do it even bigger and better. To 10x it.
And it’s ultimately a fatal one. And he’s really using speed and abundance as a shield. He’s refusing to have any sort of vulnerability, accountability, to accept failure as an option in any way through his relentless performance of success and just outrunning the past and the violence and your own spiritual debt that’s going to be haunting you. He’s literally telling us over and over that he could solve any problem and get himself anywhere he wants in his life simply through excess and velocity.
Anytime there’s a hint of emotional discomfort, he’s just somewhere he doesn’t want to be. All he has to do is spend some money, engage in some compulsive action, just find some quick release, and then just keep going.
And clearly he’s showing us this insatiable appetite. Like he can’t sit still with himself or with his own feelings. There’s no time for that. That’s not at all in his mindset. So in the way the affirmation acts as anesthesia. It’s numbing.
He weaponizes his self-confidence against his mortality or any perceived weakness. But even his winning is paranoid. He talks about laughing to the bank so much, “it’s got them suckers mad”. And if you know, obviously what happened to Young Dolph—he got murdered. That carries a very tragic undertone with it.
And I think it’s just a valuable lesson that success without true spiritual foundation and armor is going to collapse in on you. He paints speed as freedom, but he’s also self-aware that there’s some doom that comes with it. It’s transcendent, but it also foreshadows the tragic.
EMOTiONAL ALGEBRA
Look, I’ll pull out the whiteboard and really spell it out.
Emotional algebra, according to Young Dolph:
Your girl is angry? Buy her a Birkin.
You’re feeling anxious? Go whip it in your Lambo.
You’re feeling empty? Put on your designer.
Having a problem in your relationship? Yeah.
You’re feeling insecure? Check your bank account.
You’re feeling the heat of the competition? Just double down.
MY STORY
I’m a much more self-aware, integrated individual now, much more at peace, but I’m gonna step back into the younger version of myself that really identified with this without any hint of depth or irony. I was 24 years old. I was living in Houston, a city where I knew nobody other than my two business partners. We were working on our tech company. At one point, I was almost six figures in personal debt. Nothing was really working out. I was engaging in some extracurricular stuff just to stay afloat. And the only thing that was fueling me was literally my own self-affirmation.
There were many intersections where I could have opened up to people. I could have admitted defeat. I could have slowed down. I could have asked for help, but every single time I doubled down on simply working harder and trying harder and looking in the mirror and telling myself that I was going to make it.
And guess what? I made it. We made it. It felt like overnight we had millions of dollars. We had all these investors in our ear telling us we were the next big thing. All these people that were dying to work with us, so on and so forth.
And I carried that toxic mentality with me now on the other side at the top of the mountain. And I very much treated my romantic encounters with that same exact mentality. I felt like I could assert or buy my way out of any single conflict I had with any woman in my life.
I’m not going to get too much deeper, too guru-y here. But often God gives you exactly what you were praying for to show you that it’s not actually what you needed. And I’m very grateful for that experience.
CONCLUSiON
So to bring it back to Young Dolph—just why I resonate with it so much through my own reflection is you really see in this song a sort of lack of inner world. Everything is externalized through purchasing, through physicality, through an intense, ever-increasing tempo.
And we even think about the title of the album, the cover art of the album. Rich Slave.
Young Dolph in many ways is the model and still should be an inspiration for certain facets of his life. He made tens of millions of dollars. He stayed true to his art. You can literally hear it. With every word he says, that he lived that life. And that’s something that’s very intoxicating. Whether or not you may agree with it morally, it’s still a high-frequency thing.
And he took care of his people. But he even knew that he was still in the system. Even if he was independent, it actually put him in way higher danger. Because you’re brazenly disrespecting the gatekeepers and they don’t like that. It makes you an easy target.
So all that self-belief, all that spectacle couldn’t save him. And honestly, I feel that he knew this and he actually channeled it, which is what still makes it powerful.
He didn’t run away from the tragedy and the danger. He just leaned into it and used that inevitability and that pressure and that risk and just alchemized it into art, into motion, into money, and squeezed every ounce of triumph that he could while he was still on this earth.
