Ebonics Translation: “Big Truck” by YoungBoy Never Broke Again

Stormer Ebonics Translations is a series of ebonics-to-English translations of rap music songs, designed to help non-native ebonics speakers better understand the vibrancy of black culture.

“Big Truck” is a single by rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again released on April 23 of this year. Overweight Korean journalist Regina Cho reviewed the song for Revolt, writing that YoungBoy “raps about how he is not the one to be messed with.”

NBA YoungBoy is one of the most popular rappers of the early 20s, releasing huge volumes of music, and with “Big Truck” he became the youngest artist to score 100 songs on the Billboard Top 100.

YoungBoy is noted for his lyrical themes involving selling drugs, having sex, and committing murder. He has become an icon of vibrant African-American culture, representing some of the strongest values that exist today in the black community.

Translator’s note: Popular rap music has become increasingly erratic in its lyrical structure, which means that even someone who is fluent in ebonics may have difficulty discerning certain contexts. Instead of traditional verses that follow a theme, rap songs are often simply a series of one-sentence statements, which may or may not have a loose connection to one another. This may be that because so many rap songs have been produced, creating new rhyming verses has become difficult. It also appears that a lot of popular rap music is being written by relatively unsophisticated AI. With all translations, there is no possibility of communicating the full meaning in the original language, but with ebonics translations of rap music, even the object-subject-verb relationship has become increasingly difficult to unravel. However, the grammatical structure is largely irrelevant, and may actually be unclear to the artist. 

“Big Truck” by YoungBoy Never Broke Again – Full English Translation

I am exhausted by cowardly men who produce music
These men are aware that I commit many crimes
I am high on drugs and attempting to confuse you
If that man insults me, I will murder him
I will shoot you in the head and steal your narcotics
I will do a drive-by shooting against you with a Baretta 9mm
I make a lot of noisy sounds, give me 1 million dollars, I am not concerned with your music festival
I produce high quality crack cocaine

I am very talented and therefore have a lot of money
I have a lot of money, but that other man was poor, so I murdered him
The next time I meet you, I will steal all of your personal belongings
You believe we are having a verbal dispute, but the next time we meet, I will immediate open fire on you
I do not appreciate cowardly men

One time, I was forced to murder a cowardly man
Because I noticed he was looking at me
I told my youthful associates to hide in the bushes outside of his house
They jumped out and shot him to death when he arrived home
I am a criminal, I plan to murder 30 people
Me and my cousin are close friends and we commit many murders together
However, if I find my cousin is associating with you, I will murder him
I hope we can all make a lot of money
You can compare me to a big truck, because I sell narcotics and am very talented
I don’t care about anything, buddy, I commit murder randomly
Inform that woman that it’s time to perform oral sex on me

I am not lying about all of these crimes I commit
Cowardly men gossip about me because I am a successful murderer
I will steal everything from you, I will murder you, I will steal all of your money
I will remove my gold jewelry before I go on a killing spree
I do not trust any females because they are all very promiscuous
I was raised in difficult circumstances so I am proficient at criminality
Other people want me to stop committing crimes because they are jealous of my proficiency
Cowardly men with no money ask for my assistance and then try to murder me