A wounded man slumps against a white wall on a city street. It’s late at night, and there’s nobody on the road, and no one within earshot to help him as he bleeds. With an infernal cackle, another man (or perhaps it only seems to be a man) descends to the sidewalk from the skies. As the wounded man begins to lose consciousness, the second man approaches him and whispers something malicious. The first man in this nightmare scene is Jacksonville rapper and singer Yungeen Ace. The second man could be the Grim Reaper, or a representative of a malevolent, semi-human race, or just a figment of the star’s imagination – a projection made amid his delirium and pain.
If you think this scene from “So Long,” the latest video from Jacksonville, Florida’s Yungeen Ace, is just a metaphor, then you don’t know anything about the rapper’s life, or what he’s gone through. No, he hasn’t gone toe to toe with a physical manifestation of Death, but he’s taken the punches and beaten the odds, and he’s lived to sing and rap about it. Less than a year ago, the vocalist took eight bullets while shielding his friends from an assailant. That night, Yungeen Ace watched three members of his crew die in front of him. He’s lost family members, faced incarceration, and felt the sting of poverty and hunger – in short, he’s gone through more hardship in his 21 years than most people do in a lifetime.
