For the next wave of Atlanta MCs, it’s especially hard to overstate Future’s importance. Quavo, of Migos -- who will be opening for Future on tour later this year -- first heard the rapper as a young hustler on Atlanta’s North Side. “I’d never heard nobody go so hard on Auto-Tune. And on rapping, I never heard anybody really snap like that,” he says. “That was a big moment for Atlanta. It touched the young n—as who was out grinding like us, and made us want to grind harder.”
Future loves the feeling he gets from his house in Miami, a gleaming, ultramodern party pad with an almost surreally blue infinity pool that appears to flow into the ocean. “I love waking up to the beach, the yachts, the fast cars and the foreign cars,” he says. “There’s a wide range of inspiration here.” Today’s ride is both fast and foreign: a $200,000 bespoke Range Rover SVR, with 500 horsepower and motorized tray tables in the back seats. As a general principle, Future would rather ride than drive -- his uncle is his longtime chauffeur -- which is why his favorite cars in his fleet are the Bentley Bentayga SUV and the Maybach. “Six years I been having a driver,” he says. “That’s how I play the game.”
Future also has homes in a tony Atlanta suburb and is planning on getting a new place Los Angeles, where he moved when he was with the singer Ciara (with whom he has a son). His five kids, who have four different moms, range in age from 2 to 15. Becoming the successful patriarch of this sprawling clan, even if he’s not exactly a conventional dad, is clearly one of the things he’s most proud of. “I’m the motherf—ing provider,” he says. “That’s what God put me here for. Everybody ride what they want to ride, dress how they want to dress, live how they want to live.”
In Future’s late teens, around the time his first son was born, he began lobbying family members to put in a good word with his cousin Wade, whose Organized Noize crew crafted hits like “Waterfalls” for TLC and was the house production team for the Dungeon Family, a collective of experimentally minded Atlanta acts including OutKast and Goodie Mob. Finally, after connecting at a family funeral, Wade agreed to bring the teenage Meathead over to his house. Wade was wary: The young Future was living on the streets, moving drugs out of his grandmother’s house and had recently been shot in the hand. He was part of what Wade calls “the street side of the family -- they all hustled.” (Although not Future’s mother, who worked as a 911 operator. He moved out of her house after he quit school to sell drugs. The two are now close.) But Future quickly proved himself. “When I got him around the music he sounded good,” says Wade. “But I really wanted to know if I could trust him. The reason he has excelled in the music game is because he has a moral compass -- he doesn’t take advantage of people, and he can tell who’s really down for him and who’s not.”
Future moved in with Wade and dove into the studio. He wrote the hook for Ludacris’ “Blueberry Yum Yum,” cut his own tracks and recorded an album as part of a group called Da Connect. (Wade notes that the name change was all but inevitable: “Dude was just too fly to be Meathead.”) Looking back on that time -- Future has the words “dungeon” and “family” tattooed in large gothic script on his forearms -- the MC says that the musical ethos he picked up is how he still operates: “Use everything around you to create: good, bad, negative, whatever it is. Never be afraid to be exactly who you are.”
Future eventually hooked up with a tight, young crew of producers -- Metro Boomin, Mike Will Made It, Zaytoven, DJ Spinz, 808 Mafia -- that he still mostly works with today, and together they began to reshape Atlanta’s sound. “They’re making records like [Migos’] ‘Bad and Boujee’ and [Rae Sremmurd’s] ‘Black Beatles’ and these Future records that are taking over the country,” says Reid. “But they’re staying true to their core. I’ve never seen it done so well, not since the early days of hip-hop.”