“Rack City”

Since forever, but especially in the late 2000s, good things just happened to you if you were a light-skinned dude. Not much else explains how Tyga got on. In 2007, he made a little noise as an LA-area teen with his debut mixtape *Young on Probation*, which had ‘Fuck Em,’ a buzzy hyphy cut mostly about fucking girls in the butt. Somehow, that found the ears of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz, who was building a new imprint called Decaydance. Ol’ Pete was a big-time Lil Wayne head like a lot of people who were alive at the time. Of course, he couldn’t sign Wayne, but he figured Tyga was the next best thing. Tyga later joked, ‘He wanted to sign me just ’cause I had a lot of tattoos like Lil Wayne.’ Well, Tyga kept on hustling his way upward, becoming something of a thirst-trapping hip-hop Forrest Gump. He teamed up with Warped Tour’s resident rap-rocker Travie McCoy—another Pete Wentz co-signed tatted-up lightskin—for ‘Coconut Juice,’ a bubbly teen jungle-juice-chugging anthem produced by the guys who would go on to do Metro Station’s ‘Shake It.’ Around the same time, and through Wentz, Tyga met and exchanged numbers with Lil Wayne at the MTV VMAs. For a while, Weezy ghosted his texts, but soon he invited Tyga down to Atlanta to hang out as he was building momentum for the soon-to-be pop culture behemoth *Tha Carter III*. Tyga was right there when Wayne made ‘A Milli,’ even spitting a verse that, for the good of planet Earth, stayed on the engineer’s hard drive. Then when Wayne cemented himself as a rap God, he handed Tyga a spot in his Young Money clique. That would give Tyga a significant attention boost, but he was stuck behind a more powerful light-skinned rapper: Drake. It was a blessing in disguise, though, because Tyga wasn’t meant to be the man; he began to figure out that his true path forward was to be a human incubator for rap trends. Meanwhile, in LA, Tyga was a regular at jerk parties: High school-aged crews with popping Myspace accounts battling each other with loose-limbed dance moves and stripped-down slappers. Real hip-hop! The craze was in full swing. There, he met YG and DJ Mustard, who were running the local party scene. Naturally, the jerk sound worked its way into Tyga’s 2010 joint mixtape *Fan of a Fan* with Chris Brown: the weightless drum bonks of ‘Drop Top Girl,’ the beatboxing rhythm of ‘G Shit,’ and snapbacks that seemed like they were stapled to their heads. The next year, Tyga and CB popped up on the Mustard-produced slow-bop ‘Hell Yeah’ off YG’s *Just Re’d Up*, coincidentally the same mixtape that could be argued as the liftoff of Mustard’s LA ratchet movement.