How did Yeat get his rap name?
Gen Z rapper Yeat is known for some odd word choices in his songs, oftentimes just making them up outright. His very rap name, in fact, is a part of that tendency.
When Yeat first started making music as a teenager, he initially adopted the performance name Lil Yeat, but the music he released under this moniker has since been wiped from the internet. Lil Yeat is confined to history now, but, from 2018 onwards, he dropped the “Lil” and started to release music as, plainly, Yeat.
But what does this term actually mean, if anything? The closest thing to it in the dictionary is the word “yeet,” which can be used to express excitement — as in, “I’m so excited. Yeet!” — or can be used as a verb meaning, broadly, “to throw.”
It’s been suggested by some that Yeat, who is one of NBA Youngboy’s favourite rappers, combined this term, “yeet,” with “heat,” in order to come up with his stage name, but, according to the rapper himself, that’s not it. As he tells it, he wanted a one-word stage name that, somehow, felt familiar.
He found that in “Yeat,” which, as he revealed during a 2021 interview with Our Generation Music, he landed upon while he was stoned. “I’m not going to lie,” he said of coming up with the moniker, “it was really like some high shit.”
“I just wanted to do something like one word, and just make it simple and kind of relatable,” he said of what he was looking for in a stage name. “People hear my name, they feel like they already heard of me.”
Not only did drugs help Yeat to find his stage name, but they also encouraged him to start rapping in the first place. It was only after dropping acid that he decided to actually pursue a career in music, as he admitted during that same Our Generation Music interview.
“I really think it helped open my mind and think about shit differently,” he said of his acid experience. “It didn’t make me rap, but it kind of gave me the idea, like, I could just do whatever I put my mind to.”
Rapping allowed Yeat to put his instinct for making up words to good use, which was something he had been doing since he was a kid. His father made up “words for shit all the time,” and Yeat, in turn, did the same. He clearly has a knack for it, as evidenced by his very stage name.