Best Rapper Alive. It’s a lofty goal. A phrase Jay-Z famously uttered in 2003 on “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” that declared Shawn Carter the new standard while still paying respect to the late greats Tupac “2Pac” Shakur and Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace. A few years later, the other Mr. Carter, Lil Wayne, laid claim to the throne by outworking any and all competition with a canon of indisputable music.
But in 2022, who wears the crown (at least now that Jay has graduated to full-on GOAT)? Is it our perennial hitmaker Drake? The brilliant J. Cole? Or maybe it’s the enigmatic Kendrick Lamar who would probably garner the most votes. But in hip-hop’s always-on culture, can you really be the best rapper alive if you haven’t given us an album in five years?
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And doesn’t the South got somethin’ to say? Last year, when Spotify’s RapCaviar asked Twitter which rappers would be on the Mount Rushmore of the 2010s, fans decreed it would be Drake, Cole, Kendrick…and who? LeBron James quickly led the charge for Future as the fourth, with James Caan (yes, that James Caan) among the chorus of supporters. (Eventually, the great Nicki Minaj received the RapCaviar nod.) Later in the year, in an interview with N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN on the Drink Champs podcast, Kanye West made what at the time sounded like a bold declaration: Future is the most influential artist of the past decade.
“I got here through music,” Future tells me. “I didn’t get here for having the best interviews. Other dudes in the world can have the best speech. They can do this in one take and it’d be perfect. I just found a way to make art with words. And through that, that’s just how I live.”
But was Kanye’s declaration really so bold? Consider Future’s style, which, while widely imitated, is today still singular. Not only does Future use his voice to contort words and syllables into shapes we’ve never encountered before—his own innovative take on the concept of “bars”—but his verses are uniquely versatile: He can traipse the full spectrum of human emotion, from lovingly tender to cruelly toxic to heart-wrenching to turned up to 11, all within the space of an eight count.
Artistically, his impact can’t be denied. Especially not after eight solo albums, 19 solo mixtapes, one collaborative album, four collaborative mixtapes, two EPs, and one soundtrack (for 2018’s Superfly). Worldwide, he’s been streamed over 30 billion times and has, in the process, inspired an entire generation of rappers. Few artists are as prolific.
When you survey the hip-hop landscape, no other artist has been as consistently excellent, or as influential, for as long as he has. He invented his own sound, which has since become the dominant style in rap. He has delivered hit after hit after hit. And he’s done it all on his own terms.
I’ll say it again: Future is the best rapper alive.
In the beginning, few believed that he would be at the forefront of hip-hop music. In the aughts he was known as Meathead, the Dungeon Family outcast more committed to hustling than music, before he flooded the Atlanta underground with a series of undeniable mixtapes. (DJ Drama once told me that every club DJ had to have a 30-minute Future set to keep the party going.)
Today, Future is the King of Atlanta—and he earned it. Consider his contemporaries. It saddens me every time Jeezy stirs up comeback talk and then falls short. T.I. is more committed to becoming a comedian these days. Ludacris is a bona fide movie star. And the youth all still check for Future. He’s the O.G. who’s still considered a peer (and a rival) to the younger artists he collaborates with musically.
One of my favorite Future songs is 2019’s “Krazy but True,” a rare, clear declaration of his desire to be hip-hop’s top dawg:
“I’m God to you n-ggas, I worked too hard just to spoil you n-ggas
You need to pay me my respect
Your socks, rings, and your lean
The way you drop your mixtapes, your ad-libs, and everything
Damn, that’s crazy, but it’s true.…
I was the ghost behind the page
I freestyle every day
I never depend on none of these rappers, they bite me anyway
Damn, that’s crazy, but it’s true.”
In casual conversation, Future is funny, often playful. But once the tape recorder light turns red for an interview, something in him changes and talking to him becomes a chess match. He’s 38, yet still a bit of a smart-ass kid, shrewdly deflecting questions by asking me about myself, like my time working at The Source and XXL magazines. I’m used to it with Future, though. He’s a cranky creative with a platinum touch. He’s hard to pin down. But we have history.
When Future’s smash hit “Racks” hit in 2011, I couldn’t tell the difference between Future and the song’s lead artist YC. At my hip-hop blog, Rap Radar, the slander aimed at Future was immediate. What is this mumble rap? We called Future “the Autotune crooner.” We felt he was stepping in the lane of T-Pain.
“Tony Montana,” Future’s own first big single, did little to change my opinion. But it did feature Drake, whom I had already developed a close enough relationship with to hit up personally, BlackBerry to BlackBerry.
Why are you on this song? I remember messaging him. I don’t get it.
You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Drake replied. Future is dope.
Future’s dizzying run of early hits was undeniable. “Same Damn Time” knocked so hard that Sean “Diddy” Combs felt compelled to hop on the remix and deliver his hardest verse in years. I became a believer.
Future’s 2012 debut, Pluto, was promising, and I was all the way locked in for his second album, Honest. For my CRWN live-interview series in 2014, we rented out Atlanta’s Plaza Theatre and I got to share the stage with him. “I laid the foundation for any artist to come behind me,” Future said that night. And they did. Artists from that era, like Desiigner and Lil Durk. And artists still to come, like Lil Baby, Gunna, and Lil Uzi Vert. They all borrow inspiration from his style, and Future had thoughts for all of his disciples: “I wrote the dictionary for what you use, words for designing…. All their ad-libs, from the way you do your verses to your melodies, it comes from Future. It’s hard to get away from it, because I did the blueprint.”
Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn grew up in Kirkwood, an area of Atlanta roiled by the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. A lot of drugs and a lot of guns. Young Nayvadius was brought up by his mother, with help from aunts and uncles, but sometimes even a village isn’t quite enough. He says he used to have junkies drive him to class. Most fondly, a “junkie named Fred,” Future told me onstage in Los Angeles at another CRWN event, in 2019. “Shout-out, Fred, too! He used to take me to school.” Nayvadius dropped out of Decatur’s Columbia High School during his senior year.
At a family member’s funeral around that time, Future ran into his cousin Rico Wade, whom he had always considered a kind of father figure. The funeral meeting led Nayvadius, with one foot still in the streets, to hang out in the studio with the legendary Dungeon Family. (One of Future’s favorite moments in the studio was witnessing André 3000 freestyle his guest verse for Sleepy Brown’s 2004 song “I Can’t Wait.”) He was there not just with Dungeon Family members like the Goodie Mob, Killer Mike, and Bubba Sparxxx but with outside artists like Trey Songz, Talib Kweli, and Daz Dillinger. Nayvadius began learning and making music. It was a different kind of education from school but a learning experience all the same. “I’m like, ‘They’re living like street dudes where I’m from, but living better. It’s legit,’” he recalled back in 2019. “That’s when I started thinking, I can take this serious.”
In 2011, Epic Records’ then chairman Antonio “L.A.” Reid signed Future to his label. A move that felt preordained. Reid had worked with Rico Wade’s production crew, Organized Noize, when Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds signed OutKast to their LaFace Records in the 1990s. “I think Future’s consistency is a big part of his wave,” says OutKast’s Big Boi. “He always comes through with a clutch jam. Dungeon Family genetics.”
Future had an incredible mixtape run in the underground Atlanta circuit with efforts like Dirty Sprite, and his debut studio album, Pluto, spawning several hits. By the time Honest was being teased, Future’s projects were feverishly anticipated on a mainstream scale. (While Honest went gold, its reception from the blogs and hardcore rap fans was lukewarm, and it was the last Future solo album that didn’t go to the top of the Billboard 200 chart. As Future told me in Los Angeles in 2019: “Honest, I wasn’t quite honest.”)
Faced with a potential slump, Future was also dealing with rumors of a split with his former fiancée, R&B star Ciara. This, after Future, Ciara, and Mike Will Made It, one of Future’s most prolific producer-collaborators, created a massive hit in “Body Party” for her 2013 self-titled album. The song seemed to mark the beginning of a creative partnership, but it was not to be.
“Body Party” went double platinum and was Ciara’s biggest sales success since 2004’s “1, 2 Step.” Their son, Future Zahir Wilburn, was born in 2014, but Future Sr. and Ciara broke off their engagement, and Ciara later started dating her now husband, Russell Wilson. Unfairly or not, the tabloids—and Twitter—had a field day.
Future, meanwhile, retreated from the public spotlight and went back to the Georgia underground. He put his head down and got to work, reemerging with a triumvirate of classic mixtapes: Monster, Beast Mode, and 56 Nights, that last one featuring “March Madness,” which at the time was one of the biggest hits of his career. “Future dropped hit after hit for over 10 years without any major breaks between releases and evolving with each project while always remaining rooted in the streets,” Epic Records chair and CEO Sylvia Rhone tells me. “He is so prolific and so dedicated to his craft that he lives in the studio. He’s understated in many ways.”
Future reclaimed his swagger and hasn’t looked back.
In March, I met up with Future at Jungle City, the iconic recording studio on Manhattan’s West Side. Clad in a navy-and-orange tracksuit, with his trademark dreads falling over his eyes, Future is stone-faced. He’s ready to let the music do the talking.
Jungle City boasts wide, inspiring views of the Hudson. Everyone from Pusha T to Justin Bieber has recorded here. Elements of classic albums like Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Rihanna’s Anti, J. Cole’s 2014 Forest Hills Drive, and Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., were all crafted in this facility. An appropriate spot then for Future to unveil the new music he’s been working on for his next album during his longest sabbatical to date.
“That’s because I’m happy,” he says of the hiatus now. “I’m genuinely happy with life. And there was a time where I was only happy when I was on the stage, and in the studio. Like it was my escape.”
At Jungle City he’s surrounded by his core crew, including his photographer, Dwight “Shootrr” Elder, and his boisterous blood brother, Casino, who is the CEO of their record label, Freebandz. Weed smoke is thick, but there’s no alcohol consumption. Instead, the studio console is overflowing with candy, snacks, and sodas. It’s sweet tooth heaven. Future, with no preamble, presses “play.”
Jungle City is, like, surround sound. In these situations I’m usually able to keep my cool. But the music Future’s playing is making it hard for me to maintain my poker face. Truth be told, Future’s last two albums, 2019’s The Wizrd and 2020’s High Off Life, weren’t my favorites, despite going gold and platinum, respectively. I’d argue they fall prey to formula, filler, and moments of creative indecisiveness. Taken together, they suggested gravity might have finally come for Future’s dominance, the kind of decline that often hits a rapper after a decade at the top. And it was noticeable that after his disappointing 2020 collaborative project with one of his disciples, Lil Uzi Vert—the album was called Pluto x Baby Pluto—2021 was the first year of his entire career that Future didn’t release a full-length project of his own.
But Future was far from ready to be written off. Especially when you consider his more recent run of features. There’s Rick Ross’s “Warm Words in a Cold World,” which plucked Future from his typical trap sonics and had him sounding geeked and confident (Emblematic lyric: “Let her ride foreign just so she won’t be tacky”). Future shows up and shows out at the beginning and end of upstart Nardo Wick’s “Me or Sum,” rapping, “All bad bitch eat seafood.” And on 42 Dugg’s “Maybach,” Future addresses one of his famous exes: “Tell Steve Harvey I don’t want her.” (Future dated Harvey’s daughter, entrepreneur and model Lori Harvey, for two years, beginning in 2019.)
Still, I’m hoping for a full studio album that reasserts his status. His approach may be unconventional, but at his core, Future is a spirited storyteller. For his next album to triumph, I just want that authenticity, that realness, that smidgen of exaggerated and ruthless masculinity (with a wink) mixed up with his signature vulnerability that pulls us in. The unique combination of elements that make Future who he is. “Putting this project together is just people understanding that I love hard,” he admits. “Probably love the hardest. I wanted to showcase my skills as far as melodies and topics and being vulnerable.”
The new music relies less on hooks and more on aggression. Future attacks the opening tracks with the type of lyrical ferocity he displayed on his signature classic, “March Madness.” A full version of a viral snippet labeled “Hermès Astronaut” booms through the speakers. Future flows over tranquil wood flutes, and it sounds even better than the tease suggested. Another song includes the lyrics: “After I fuck you, let me cry on your shoulder.” A little of his trademark toxicity with a memorable turn of phrase.
Future sounds reignited, unstoppable. “I’m putting myself out there,” says Future. “Sharing my lifestyle with the world. Sharing my pain with the world. Sharing my ups, sharing my downs with the entire universe. I believe in the energy of the universe and manifestation. That’s why I’m giving myself, because I’m willing to correct myself. I don’t want to just…be wrong. I’m willing to give you all of me, so you can tell me how to build on me, and make me a better me.”
After a barrage of solo bangers, Future shares the spotlight with other artists on songs featuring Kanye West, Drake, and Gunna (a fresh follow-up to their pulsating smash “Pushin P”). Future has always gotten by with a little help from his friends. Most notably Drake on 2015’s What a Time to Be Alive, an impromptu collaborative mixtape, the result of a six-day studio cram session.
“He’s an absolutely relentless, spontaneous workhorse,” Drake tells me. “And me, I’m a calculated, purpose-driven, militant individual. You take his free-flowing genius and you mix it with my level of understanding and planning and—records, albums, singles—we can pretty much create anything together.”
The Drake and Future partnership has been particularly fruitful. Creatively, Future says that the pair just really connect. “Anytime we work in the studio, the level, the energy—we’re trying to perfect this shit but still stay raw, still stay gritty, and still be moving at the speed of the universe,” says Future. “It’s something that you have to work at, but it’s something that you have to find too.”
Future feels blessed that he met Drake so early on in his career: “We made the most out of it. You’re in a place where your self-esteem and ego allow a person to be in your space. And not be afraid to be like: I want to align and build with this…. You’re never weak when you understand another man’s strengths. I’m never weak now. I know what I need to be unstoppable. I know what I need to feel like, Okay, I’m never lacking, or, I’m never down.”
Their number one record is Drake’s “Way 2 Sexy,” with Young Thug. And, Drake adds, they have “no plans of stopping.” Remarkably, it was Future’s first number one single on the Billboard Hot 100. “To have a number one record after 10 years, I still had to prove myself,” he says.
I ask why he thinks that is. Why he still has to show and prove himself.
“I don’t even give a fuck,” he responds.
He estimates that his ability to evolve is what has given him longevity. “I grew in the business and I made adjustments and I continued to build, continued to overcome any doubt,” he says. “If there was doubt, there’s no more doubt. I’m here to stay. I already proved that. Had a hundred hits in one year, they still like, ‘Hey, what are you going to do next?’ I had to prove it again that I can do it again. Came back and dropped one album [2017’s Future] and dropped another album the following week [Hndrxx].” He literally replaced himself at the top of the charts. He made history. “I proved that I can have two number one albums in two weeks. I had to prove so many times throughout my career that I was here to stay.”
Future and Drake have both, in their own way, changed the course of rap history. But the person we see kicking it with Future at Balenciaga stores and in Miami Heat courtside seats right now is Kanye West. “Me and Kanye always had a relationship,” Future reveals to me now. “But it’s hard for people to understand, because I don’t put everything on Instagram. Kanye flew me to Paris in 2011 or 2012 to work on music. [Discussing] his clothing line before it came, his shoe business before it came. People don’t know I’ve been able to go to his house, and pull up right into the crib. We just never talked about it.”
It seems like a random pairing until you recall Future’s 2014 “I Won,” a saccharine dedication to their paramours at the time, Ciara and Kim Kardashian. Years later, West isn’t just openly sharing that he asked Future for help on new music, he fully enlisted Future as an executive producer of Donda 2, which tackles his divorce drama and the deterioration of his relationship with Kim. I ask him what his reaction was when he heard Kanye call him “the most influential artist of the past 10 years” on the Drink Champs podcast.
“When he said that, I understood why he called me to Paris, even though I didn’t understand it at that time,” says Future. “I understood why we had certain conversations. I understood him being a part of ‘I Won.’ Even him having me write on certain [Kanye] albums that people don’t even understand I wrote on.”
Future says working closely with Kanye is about the love of the game. “Sometimes not getting credit when you write with him because the love of the art is…I want it to be right. Top tier. Just being able to create and put those textures over different music, and being involved with something like that. And then later down the line in a priceless moment, him saying what he said on Drink Champs. The value of that statement. The value of the relationship as it continues to grow, the value of just treating people like they are priceless, instead of treating people like they got a dollar sign on them every time.”
It’s that mentality—treating people right, no matter if you’re getting something in return—that separates Future from many of his industry peers. “When you don’t think people are looking, they’re looking,” he says. “They’re watching. When you don’t think they are listening, they’re listening. I could have broken a bridge that I want to cross again, a broken bridge that I might need to cross again, off an assumption. But I just knew, every time when I do anything, man, I was doing it out of the kindness of my heart. I don’t want to have any expectations for someone else and they let me down.”
Last December, Future brought West out during his headlining set at Rolling Loud in San Bernardino, California. “There’s brotherly love for each other,” he says. “You’re going to pop out when it’s time to pop out. And every time I ask you to do something, it’s going to make sense. We made the biggest moment.” West even impromptu freestyled over “Fuck Up Some Commas.” Live in front of tens of thousands of fans, Ye went from full secular cussing to chanting “Jesus gang.”
There may or may not be a couple of lady friends in an adjoining room at Future’s Peninsula New York penthouse the night before his cover shoot. Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy is on a big screen, but a tired Future is lying on the couch, oblivious. Before calling it a night, he wants someone to come in and braid his hair.
We start talking about his first release of 2022, “Worst Day.” It’s about the Valentine’s Day blues of a man with too many women to please: “Feel like I’m God-level, so many chicks I adore / Avoidin’ the hurt, ridin’ in circles in a Aventador.”
“I’m just like, shit, this is the perfect time to put it out,” says Future. “Get past it. Talk about it. Don’t have to talk about it no more”—it being his previous high-profile relationships and drama with his many babies’ mothers. “It was like some shit the fans wanted to hear from me, but at the same time I was already really past it.”
The music video for the song begins with an interview with controversial YouTube image consultant Kevin Samuels, who believes that women overestimate their beauty and success, and hence their value in the social marketplace as they get older. His inclusion was seemingly designed to provoke the Internet; The Source called the video a link-up of “toxic all-stars.” Future, however, says he didn’t know who Samuels was until the video dropped, and if he did he “probably wouldn’t have picked him” to be a guest star. “If I knew who he was before the video, I would’ve felt like it was a typical move,” says Future, who notes that the creative decision was made by the video’s director. “People associate me with being toxic. I would’ve overthought it.”
He says that these days, he’s not too concerned with the toxic masculinity tag that seems to always follow him around. “People have their own definition of what toxic is,” says Future. “[These women] all were toxic to me. They just don’t want to admit it.”
Future Answers Questions From His Celebrity Friends
“Can I do a song while we’re doing this?”
It’s rare to truly witness an artist at work. Especially one as successful as Future. And he puts an end to our time together in an unforgettable way by recording a song from scratch. I’ve been in the studio with a lot of artists, but this was a new experience. Sitting at a microphone stationed outside the vocal booth and beside the engineer—a technique he’s continued to develop since his eight-times-platinum single “Mask Off” was created that way—Future is less than six feet to my left, verbally sketching out lyrics and melodies. He stutters through declarations like, “Trapping with a demon / We’re like twin brothers” and “She walked in with a goofy, I got a chance to intercept it” and proceeds to build a verse brick by brick, laying his vocals down one line at a time. In 20 or so minutes, he has a pretty strong demo that’s now booming out into the wee hours of Manhattan.
“I do art, man,” says Future. “It doesn’t lose value. It doesn’t depreciate. My passion is always going to overcome anything. This project is about sometimes having an open heart, handling everybody with open arms, man. You are going to get the bad end of the situation. Sometimes people out there try to make you seem like the suspect. Really, you are the victim. But at the same time, I’ve always been put on a pedestal, that either I can’t complain about certain shit, I can’t speak on certain shit.”
Future thinks he’s finally achieved some measure of happiness by simply “living and growing.” But the vulnerability that made him a star is still very much a part of his music. It always will be. “I always found a way to create around everything, man. I turn pain into diamonds.”
Pain into diamonds.
“I do that,” says Future, “with my eyes closed.”
Elliott Wilson is a journalist and the chief content officer of Tidal.
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Gregory Harris
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Grooming by Kumi Craig using La Mer At The Wall Group
Manicure by Maki Sakamoto using Essie
Tailoring by Marius Ahiale for Lars Nord Studio
Set design by Nicholas Des Jardins
Production by That One Production