The video for “Strike (Holster),” the Lil Yachty single released earlier this year, is typical of the now 26-year-old musician. He jigs on the lakeside dock in a pile-y red fleece and sheer red rank rain jacket. He stomps through the woods in a mint flannel, a powder blue baseball cap, and some soggy Timberland boots. In one scene, dressed as a jiggy Ebenezer Scrooge in a long stocking cap-like beanie, he raps in front of a Maybach sedan with a giant bottle of Wockhardt prescription cough syrup strapped to its roof; in another, he topples 15 bottles of the promethazine like so many bowling pins.

It’s pretty much Yachty doing what he’s done with relative consistency since he first snagged listeners eight years ago: mixing the aesthetic codes of classic and contemporary hip-hop with his own goofily bizarre sensibility. It feels almost quaint to mention now, but, at one point in time, Yachty was part of a cohort of young, internet-bred musicians we were calling “SoundCloud rappers.” Their hair was often dyed, their subject matter was base, and their bars (where there were bars to speak of) were, technically, not of the conventional hip-hop standard that we’d grown used to.

Crucially, improbably, it was undeniably lit. And while many onlookers were quick to call the movement a fad, all these years later, Yachty and peers like Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti have molded mainstream hip-hop in their image. Today, one can’t throw a stone without hitting a rapper who has painted their nails, worn women’s clothing, or at the very least, experimented with an unusual flow.

Yachty’s aspirations, however, have always been greater than just changing the way rappers wear their pants. Throughout his music career, he has shown himself to be an artist with a range as broad as it is unexpected. He’s seemingly just as at home belting out forlorn synth pop alongside Japanese crooner Joji as he is clocking counterfeit drugs on tracks with Michigan scam rapper BabyTron. This past January, the bounds of that range were tested with the release of his fifth album, Let’s Start Here.. Boasting an indie-rock murderer’s row of collaborators including Jacob Portrait of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Patrick Wimberly of Chairlift, Ben Goldwasser of MGMT, Mac DeMarco, and Alex G, the album is a tightly sequenced, hour-long trip of psyched-out ’70s rock and woozy funk. It’s a venture into unexplored territory for Yachty, and, to many who had followed his music since its “bubblegum trap” infancy, it represents an unexpected left turn.

This, the rapper tells me over video call with mild exasperation, is a bit of a misread. “I think it was a left turn to the outside world because people don’t really know me, so they don’t know what I listen to and what I like,” Yachty says. I imagine this is what most pop musicians might say about themselves. But for Yachty, it seems like more than indignant bluster. This past April, he appeared as a guest on Kai Cenat’s Twitch stream. At one point, the popular YouTuber challenged him to pull from his cache of unreleased music and play songs that corresponded to a desired “vibe.” Reclining in a gamer chair in a navy FUBU hoodie with a smug grin that grew with each queue, Yachty successfully met calls for jazz, Caribbean, Jersey club, and “freaky” vibes. He was even able to scrounge up a somewhat convincing country tune.

For Let’s Start Here., Yachty had a very specific sonic touchstone. “I wanted to make my Dark Side of the Moon,” he tells me, referring to Pink Floyd’s 1973 prog rock opus and college dorm room poster favorite. Yachty’s record is a dutiful, if not quite as groundbreaking, homage to its chief influence. Long instrumental flights are broken by melodic eruptions from vocalists like Fousheé, Justine Skye, Diana Gordon, and of course, Yachty himself, whose modulated yips and yelps have never sounded more otherworldly. On songs like “WE SAW THE SUN!” he encourages listeners to revel in the simple beauty of being sentient. At the listening event for the record in January, he told a theater full of friends, fans, and press that he hoped they had come equipped with the right psychedelics.

In the lead up to its release, Yachty expressed that part of his inspiration for making the album was that he wanted “to be taken seriously as an artist.” Some critics took umbrage at this sentiment, feeling that he was yet another rapper signaling that in order for their work to merit “serious” consideration they had to leave hip-hop for a more artistically vaunted genre like rock. Yachty resents this interpretation. “People are so stupid. What I want to do in my life, and if I want to take a break from rap, it has nothing to do with the culture and the genre,” he says. “I didn’t mean I couldn’t [be taken seriously] as a rapper, I just wanted to do it because I loved this type of shit.” I believe him. As he speaks, I begin to understand the statement as less a dismissal of hip-hop and more a somewhat guileless attempt at brand repositioning. Early in his career, Yachty built a name with cynical gimmicks like hailing himself “King of Teens.” Now, in his mid-twenties with loads of fame and commercial success, it seems he’s trying to assume a more dignified artistic identity.

Still, it begs the question, who are the supposed “people” Yachty wants to be taken seriously by? When I pose this to him, the characteristically forthright musician falters somewhat. “I just wanted to be recognized. Whether it was awards or, I don’t know. It sounds corny saying it out loud, but I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe in certain conversations, just be mentioned. Or even stupid shit — if Complex did a list of the best albums of the year, something like that. I never was a part of any of those things. And they probably don’t even matter, and I don’t want anyone to think they matter, but I don’t know.”

There are other pop musicians, acts who do get mentioned in certain conversations, whom Yachty says he looks to for inspiration. He thinks Frank Ocean is a genius. He admires Tyler, the Creator and Donald Glover for their multidisciplinary success. Another artist he views as a lodestar is someone he’s become good friends with: Drake. It’s a relationship he says he manifested while in an altered state. “I was doing acid one day and was like, ‘Man, I would loooooove to work with Drake.’... I’d love to even just be in the room.” Yachty says he had known the Canadian rapper-cum-online-casino-spokesman for some time, but it wasn’t until he sent the rapper the beat for what would become the Certified Lover Boy song “Fair Trade” that the two became close. The intimacy of that relationship was on full display earlier this year in a rare sit-down interview that Drake gave to Lil Yachty for the sunglasses brand FUTUREMOOD. The meandering 35-minute conversation covers a lot of ground, from Drake contemplating retiring from music to that therapy-induced realization that, metaphorically speaking, he always has “the biggest tits in the room.” These days, Yachty says he and the 36-year-old pop star talk “every single day, all day” about everything including, but not limited to, “memes and funny shit, women, clothes, and life.”

On the subject of clothes and style, Yachty has many thoughts. A notoriously theatrical dresser, the musician has made some big choices throughout the years. To his first Grammy ceremony, in 2017, he wore a $35,000 pair of rainbow grills with stones of white, blue, and yellow diamonds, as well as red rubies and green emeralds. At 21 Savage’s Freaknik-themed 30th birthday party in Atlanta last fall, Yachty paired a Lynx fur coat with quite the largest fur trapper hat anyone has ever worn. And many, of course, will remember the Kool-Aid red beaded box braids that, for a long time, were his trademark. Across his career, Yachty has tried on a number of sartorial characters. At the onset, he leaned into classic hip-hop tropes as the leader of the “Sailing Team,” sporting vintage Nautica rugbys, varsity jackets, and occasional prep wear. More recently, he was piloting a character named “C.V. Thomas,” a grimacing mogul with Band-Aids plastered all over his face, a headful of Bantu knots, eyes shrouded by designer shades, and a mouthful of gold slugs.

Today, Yachty tells me, he’s taking a more natural approach to his personal dress. “I’m at the point in my life where I’m just really careless,” he says, reclining on a couch. “I’ve had this striped T-shirt since high school. I used to wear this when I was broke. Real chill shit.” When I point out that the Chrome Hearts jeans and Gucci x adidas Sambas he’s paired that T-shirt with aren’t exactly what I would classify as “chill,” he concedes that it’s more about the feeling they bring. “It’s just Lil Yachty — same wrinkled vintage T-shirt, same jeans, and I just do everything. Monday I’m making strip club music, Wednesday is church, Thursday is score music for some thriller movie. We’re just doing shit,” he says. “Not as C.V. Thomas, not as some other character. Just as Lil Yachty.”

Other natural dressers he admires are friends like fashion stylist and jewelry maker Veneda Carter, designer Aris Tatalovich whose “contestant” hoodie he wore in the video for his runaway hit “Poland,” and rapper/style jedi A$AP Nast. “I always say it publicly: I think Nast is just, to me, I just think he’s one of the most stylish guys, and I don’t have an ego to say that.”

Well, if Lil Yachty is no longer a character actor, then who is he? “I’m a concrete boy. I’m solid. I’m everything. I can’t be tied down.”