1. Introduction
[1.1] I bought the headscarf on Amazon three days before the concert. Lime green satin, the kind that comes in a two-pack. I told myself I was being practical; it would keep my hair in place for the drive home. But that was not the whole truth. I had watched the TikToks for weeks: crowds at NBA YoungBoy's Make America Slime Again (MASA) Tour waving green bandanas in unison, a rippling sea of color synchronized to the beat. I wanted to be part of that. I wanted my turn.
[1.2] On October 26, 2025, I drove from Greensboro, North Carolina to Charlotte's Spectrum Center, about a one-and-a-half-hour drive, for a Sunday evening show, one of forty-two tour dates marking YoungBoy's first live performances in five years (Denis and Unterberger 2025). I went alone. I am thirty-seven years old. In the cultural vernacular, I am an auntie.
[1.3] Vendors were already set up outside the arena, selling green bandanas in varying shades, the kind that cost a dollar at Hobby Lobby, for seven dollars each. People bought them anyway, tying them around wrists, tucking them into back pockets, draping them over shoulders. As I walked toward the venue, the green multiplied. Black clothing and green fabric, a uniform emerging without instruction.
[1.4] There is something I have not yet mentioned: NBA YoungBoy and I share a hometown. I was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He grew up on the north side; I grew up on the south side. Different neighborhoods, different time periods, but the same city, shaped by the same complicated geography of poverty, survival, and aspiration. When I listen to his lyrics about childhood, emotion, and place, I am not encountering a foreign landscape. I am remembering something familiar. The green bandana is associated with his gang affiliation; a 2024 arrest affidavit stated that the FBI identified YoungBoy as the leader of the NBA (Never Broke Again) street gang (Sloan-Turner 2024). But for me, wearing green that night was also a thread back to something older and more personal than fandom alone.
[1.5] By the time YoungBoy took the stage, after the openers had warmed the crowd, I was seated in the upper level, surrounded by strangers who felt less strange by the minute. The audience was mostly Black, with pockets of Hispanic and white fans scattered throughout. The age range surprised me: young children with parents, clusters of teenagers, twenty-somethings in groups, and a few of us who had crossed into our late thirties and beyond.
[1.6] When "Shot Callin" began, the green rose. The song had dominated TikTok for months, its streaming numbers surging during the tour's opening weeks (Denis and Unterberger 2025). Bandanas lifted in every direction, waving in loose rhythm with the beat. I did not wave mine; it was tied around my head, pressed against my scalp, part of me rather than something I held. But I was in it. I was wearing the color. I was one of them.
[1.7] What was I doing? What were any of us doing? The green bandana carries specific connotations tied to real lives in places like the Baton Rouge I come from. Most of us in that arena were not gang members. We were fans. We were participating in something that looked like gang symbolism but felt like something else entirely: devotion, belonging, collective release. We were, I would later come to think, engaged in a kind of cosplay. Temporary, bounded, joyful. We were playing at something serious, and the play itself was serious too. I call this practice "gang cosplay": a temporary, bounded, and performative adoption of gang-affiliated symbols that is distinct from actual gang membership. It is a way for fans to participate in the world an artist has built, borrowing its signs to feel a sense of belonging without taking on the risks of the real thing.
[1.8] To explore this phenomenon, I adopt an autoethnographic approach, a methodology that intentionally centers the researcher's personal experience to analyze and interpret cultural phenomena (Ellis et al. 2011). I chose this method because of my personal connection to the subject matter—as a fan, a scholar, and a native of Baton Rouge—and because it allows for a thick description of the embodied and affective dimensions of fan participation that other methods might miss (Spry 2001). Autoethnography makes it possible to explore the tensions between participation and observation, belonging and analysis, from a position of embedded, reflexive knowledge that honors both the personal and the cultural.
[1.9] I introduce gang cosplay as a framework for understanding what fans are doing when they adopt an artist’s gang-affiliated symbols in bounded spaces like the concert arena. I argue that gang cosplay operates as a mode of participatory devotion, enabling fans to express loyalty, experience collective identity, and access affects such as belonging and release. Rather than pathologizing this practice or reducing it to naive glorification of violence, I take seriously what fans gain from symbolic participation and what it reveals about the affective dimensions of hip-hop fandom, particularly within Black fan communities that remain underexamined in fan studies (Martin and Griffin 2024; Wanzo 2015).
2. Artists and aesthetics
[2.1] Gang cosplay is not simply a grassroots fan practice; it is actively shaped by artists navigating the complex terrain between street authenticity, commercial branding, and fan safety. Three recent cases reveal how hip-hop artists negotiate gang aesthetics in relation to fandom.
[2.2] NBA YoungBoy's MASA tour fully embraced the gang-coded aesthetic. The tour's name co-opted a political slogan and rebranded it with "slime," a term closely associated with YoungBoy's 4KT crew and its signature green. While official tour merchandise featured the so-called slime green on T-shirts and hoodies, it did not include green bandanas. The widespread adoption of green bandanas was a fan-driven phenomenon, with unofficial vendors outside the arena meeting the demand. YoungBoy's strategy was one of implicit endorsement; he did not explicitly call for fans to wear bandanas, but his embrace of the color green created the conditions for this participatory practice to flourish.
[2.3] Chris Brown took the opposite approach during his 2025 Breezy Bowl XX anniversary tour. As fans organized online to wear red bandanas, the color associated with the Bloods, with whom Brown has long been linked, he intervened publicly: He discouraged the practice, acknowledged his past ties, and redirected his fans toward safer symbols while emphasizing the tour's focus on positivity (Alston 2025).
[2.4] Between embrace and redirection sits a third strategy, acknowledgment-with-warning, embodied by Cardi B. Cardi has acknowledged her past affiliation with the Bloods while explicitly discouraging others from joining gangs, framing gang life as costly rather than glamorous (Weaver 2018).
[2.5] These three strategies—embrace, redirection, and acknowledgment-with-warning—reveal that gang aesthetics in hip-hop are actively negotiated by artists who balance competing demands for authenticity, commercial success, and social responsibility. YoungBoy's strategy is distinct from that of Brown or Cardi B. The green is tied to a proprietary crew identity (4KT, or Never Broke Again) that is synonymous with YoungBoy himself. Where Brown and Cardi B are affiliated with broader organizations that exist outside them, YoungBoy's brand and his crew are one and the same, making fan participation a direct investment in his specific, artist-authorized world. This dynamic, in which the artist's brand is inseparable from the crew's aesthetic, is the context in which my own participation unfolded.
3. Defining gang cosplay
[3.1] I use the term "gang cosplay" to describe the temporary, performative adoption of gang-affiliated symbols by fans within bounded spaces such as concerts, fan gatherings, or online communities. Gang cosplay is not gang membership. It does not involve initiation, ongoing affiliation, criminal activity, or the obligations that define actual gang life. It is, instead, a mode of symbolic participation through which fans express devotion to an artist, signal in-group belonging, and access collective affects that the artist's music and persona make available.
[3.2] The cosplay framing is deliberate. The term may seem to trivialize a practice linked to real-world violence, but I use it intentionally. Cosplay, in its original context, is not frivolous; it is a serious form of identity work involving research, craft, and community (Lamerichs 2018; Winge 2006). To call this practice gang cosplay is not to dismiss the stakes but to name the specific mode of engagement: temporary, performative, and bounded. Alternative terms—symbolic appropriation, performative affiliation, ritual imitation—each carry connotations I want to avoid. Appropriation implies theft; affiliation implies deception; imitation implies passive mimicry. Cosplay centers the fan's active participation and resists the pathologizing language that typically attaches to discussions of Black youth and gang culture (Jones 2013). This approach builds on Wanzo's (2015) call for fan studies to engage with Black cultural criticism, which has long theorized Black audiences as active, critical participants in popular culture.
[3.3] This framing also connects this practice to an established field of fan studies scholarship. Cosplay, a portmanteau of costume and play, emerged from Japanese anime and gaming fan communities to describe the practice of dressing as fictional characters at conventions and fan events (Lamerichs 2018). Cosplay scholarship has increasingly recognized that fans dress not only as fictional characters but also as personas drawn from music, film, and other popular media—what Mountfort et al. (2019, 31) call "citational acts" that reference popular culture texts. I extend this framework to hip-hop fandom, arguing that when fans wear green bandanas at an NBA YoungBoy concert, they are not claiming to be members of the Never Broke Again organization. They are performing a temporary alignment with the artist's world.
[3.4] A skeptical reader might object that cosplay typically involves dressing as fictional characters, while gang affiliation is real. This objection has merit, and the gap between fictional source material and real-world referent is precisely what makes gang cosplay ethically complicated, a tension I address directly in section five. But the objection does not invalidate the framework. Gang cosplay, like all cosplay, involves fans who are not the thing they are dressed as, performing identification with a world that is not their everyday reality. The performance is real; the claimed identity is not. The greenness of my headscarf did not make me a member of YoungBoy's organization any more than a Sailor Moon costume makes someone a magical girl.
[3.5] This performance can be understood through Erving Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical framework, which conceptualizes social life as a series of performances in which individuals present different versions of themselves depending on context. The concert venue is what Goffman would call a front stage where fans can enact identities unavailable to them in everyday life. The green bandana is a prop; the arena is the stage; and when the lights go down and the music starts, fans are licensed to perform a self that is bolder, more connected, and more dangerous than the one they inhabit at work or at home.
[3.6] This practice also draws on older traditions of bounded transgression. Mikhail Bakhtin's (1984) concept of carnival describes social spaces where ordinary rules are suspended, and participants collectively inhabit roles, behaviors, and identities otherwise unavailable to them. The concert venue functions as a carnivalesque space: a temporary zone where a thirty-seven-year-old professor can tie a green satin scarf around her head and feel, for a few hours, like part of something larger and more dangerous than her daily life. The transgression is real in its effect but bounded in its consequences.
[3.7] Crucially, gang cosplay is participatory rather than passive. Henry Jenkins (2006) argues fans in the digital age are not passive consumers but active producers of meaning who co-create the cultural experiences they value. When fans collectively decide to wear green, purchase bandanas, and share their outfits on TikTok, they are not simply following a dress code. They are answering a call to participate, transforming a concert from a spectator event into a communal ritual, a practice consistent with the genre's live-oriented nature (Diallo 2019). When I bought that headscarf on Amazon, I was not just purchasing fabric; I was purchasing entry into a participatory ritual, a ticket to co-create the experience I had watched unfold on my phone screen for weeks.
4. What fans gain
[4.1] The easiest critique of gang cosplay is that it romanticizes violence, that fans who wave green bandanas are naively celebrating a culture that has taken real lives. This critique is not entirely wrong, but it is incomplete. It fails to ask a more generative question: What are fans actually experiencing when they participate? What needs does gang cosplay meet that other forms of fandom do not?
[4.2] The first and most immediate answer is belonging. To wear the green at a YoungBoy concert is to be visibly, unmistakably part of something. You are not just an individual who bought a ticket; you are one of thousands declaring the same allegiance through the same symbol. Sara Ahmed (2004) describes affect as something that circulates between bodies, sticking to surfaces and accumulating over time. In the arena, the green bandana becomes a sticky object: It gathers feeling to itself, binds strangers into a temporary collective, and creates what Ahmed calls an affective economy organized around shared orientation toward an object of devotion. I felt this in section 300. I did not know the people around me, but when the green rose, we were oriented together. We were facing the same direction, literally and affectively.
[4.3] The second dimension is release. Hip-hop concerts are already spaces of catharsis; fans scream lyrics, move their bodies, and surrender to the collective energy of the crowd. Gang cosplay intensifies this release by adding an element of transgression. To wear gang symbols, even temporarily, is to step outside the constraints of everyday respectability. For many fans, particularly Black fans navigating the double consciousness of professional and personal life, the concert offers permission to inhabit a self that is not permissible elsewhere. You can be loud. You can be aggressive. You can claim affiliation with a world that polite society fears.
[4.4] The pleasure of gang cosplay is partly the pleasure of playing with danger. Scholars of play have long noted that play often involves experimenting with risk in controlled environments (Sutton-Smith 1997). Children play at war; adults play at horror through film and games. Gang cosplay operates similarly: It allows fans to experience the thrill of transgression without its consequences. The concert is a safe container. The green bandana is not a commitment; it is a temporary pass into a world that, for most fans, remains otherwise inaccessible.
[4.5] There is also a dimension of intimacy with the artist. Hip-hop scholarship has long recognized that place and geography are central to the genre's claims to authenticity (Forman 2002). Unlike pop fandoms organized around unattainable celebrity, hip-hop positions the artist as rooted in a specific place, a specific set of conditions, a specific story of survival. When fans adopt YoungBoy's colors, they are not just admiring him from a distance; they are claiming proximity to his world. For those of us from Baton Rouge, this proximity is not entirely imaginary. I grew up in the same city, navigated similar conditions, and when I wear the green, I am not borrowing an identity so much as acknowledging a shared geography of origin. Forman's work reminds us that hip-hop fandom is always geographically situated; to be a fan is often to claim a relationship to a specific place, even if that claim is aspirational.
[4.6] Finally, gang cosplay offers a rare form of collective identity in contemporary life. We live in an atomized culture where belonging is often mediated through screens and dispersed across networks. The concert is one of the few remaining spaces where thousands of bodies gather in the same place, at the same time, oriented toward the same thing. In a world that offers young Black people limited avenues for collective joy, the concert is one of the few places where that joy remains possible.
5. Tensions and ethics
[5.1] I have argued that gang cosplay offers fans access to belonging, release, intimacy, and collective joy. But I am not interested in producing a naive celebration. The practice exists in tension with realities that cannot be theorized away, and intellectual honesty requires naming them. As Tricia Rose (2008) has documented, public and political disputes over hip-hop often center on the accusation that the music glorifies and causes violence. While this is a reductive view, the symbols are not without weight.
[5.2] The first tension is between symbol and referent. The green bandana at a YoungBoy concert refers to something real: the Never Broke Again organization, the streets of Baton Rouge, the violence that has shaped YoungBoy's life and taken the lives of people in his circle. When fans adopt this symbol for an evening of collective pleasure, they are borrowing from a world whose costs they do not bear. There is an asymmetry here. The fan removes the headscarf after the show and drives home to Greensboro. The people for whom green is not a costume do not have that option. I do not think this asymmetry makes gang cosplay morally impermissible, but it does make it ethically complicated in ways that participants should be willing to sit with.
[5.3] The second tension involves commodification. The vendors outside the Spectrum Center selling seven-dollar bandanas are participating in a market that profits from gang symbolism while remaining insulated from its consequences. Fans pay money to purchase symbols of affiliation that, in other contexts, are earned through risk, loyalty, and sometimes violence. The ease of the purchase is part of what makes gang cosplay possible, but it is also what distinguishes it most sharply from the real thing.
[5.4] The third tension concerns the unequal distribution of risk. The arena is a bounded space, but the boundaries are not equally enforced. A white fan in the suburbs wearing a green bandana to school might be seen as quirky; a Black teenager in a heavily policed neighborhood wearing the same symbol might be read as dangerous, a potential gang member, a threat. This disparity is structural. The same symbols that generate joy and belonging inside the arena can attract surveillance, suspicion, and violence outside it. Courts and prosecutors already use rap lyrics and music videos as evidence of gang affiliation in criminal cases; a sea of bandanas at a concert sits in that same visual economy, even if the fans themselves are just cosplaying. The joy is real, but so is the risk, and the risk is not evenly distributed.
[5.5] Gender complicates this further. Gang culture, as represented in YoungBoy's music and persona, is deeply masculinized, organized around codes of loyalty, aggression, and protection that are legible as performances of Black manhood. When I, a Black woman, tie on a green headscarf, I am not only borrowing gang affiliation; I am also, in some sense, borrowing masculinity. The release I described earlier, the permission to be loud, aggressive, unbounded, is partly a release from the gendered expectations that govern my everyday life as much as from professional respectability. This layered transgression may be part of what makes gang cosplay particularly appealing to women fans: We are not just playing at being gang affiliated, but playing at a masculine freedom that is not typically available to us. As Buchanan (2023) has shown, music fandom is a site where race and gender inequalities are both reproduced and contested, making it essential to attend to the gendered dimensions of practices like gang cosplay.
[5.6] And then there is age. I named myself in the opening as an auntie, a thirty-seven-year-old woman alone at a concert full of teenagers and twenty-somethings. What does gang cosplay offer someone like me? Perhaps it is access to a youthfulness I have otherwise outgrown, a way of returning to a version of Baton Rouge I left behind when I went to graduate school and became a professor. The green headscarf lets me, for a night, inhabit a self that is less burdened by the accumulations of adulthood.
[5.7] What was I doing when I wore that green headscarf? Was I cosplaying, or was I doing something else: remembering, claiming, mourning? I am not sure I have fully answered this question, and perhaps that uncertainty is the point. As a scholar who left Baton Rouge but never fully left it behind, my relationship to that green fabric was layered. It was a performance, yes, but also a homecoming. It was play, but it was also serious. This contradiction, the simultaneity of distance and intimacy, of analysis and participation, is what autoethnography allows us to hold.
[5.8] None of these tensions negate the value of what fans experience, but they do suggest that gang cosplay is not innocent, even when it is joyful.
6. Conclusion
[6.1] This article has introduced gang cosplay as a framework for understanding fans' temporary, performative adoption of gang-affiliated symbols in hip-hop spaces. Drawing on my own experience at an NBA YoungBoy concert, I have argued that gang cosplay is neither mere imitation nor naive glorification of violence. It is a participatory practice through which fans access belonging, release, intimacy, and collective joy—affects that are often unavailable in everyday life, particularly for Black fans navigating the constraints of respectability and professional identity.
[6.2] The framework I have proposed contributes to fan studies by centering a genre and a set of practices that remain underexamined in the field. Music fandom scholarship has increasingly attended to the power of mainstream pop audiences, from Swifties to the BTS Army. But hip-hop fandoms operate differently. They are organized around claims to authenticity, place, and shared struggle rather than around the parasocial adoration of unattainable celebrity. Gang cosplay makes visible a mode of fan participation that is embodied, ritualized, and tied to specific symbols with real-world referents. Understanding this practice requires frameworks that take both its pleasures and its complications seriously. The framework of gang cosplay offered here is most applicable to these kinds of live, artist-sanctioned fan contexts; the meaning and ethics of this practice may shift across different audiences, artists, and settings.
[6.3] More broadly, I am arguing for a shift in how we approach Black fan cultures. Stanfill (2018) argues that the field has often ignored or marginalized fans of color. Consequently, dominant discourse on Black youth and popular culture too often begins from a place of concern, treating practices as symptoms of moral decay, cultural pathology, or dangerous influence (Jones 2013; Prier and Beachum 2008). This framework forecloses curiosity. I have tried to do something different: to ask what fans gain, what needs are being met, what forms of connection and joy are being accessed. This is not to deny complexity or to ignore real-world violence. It is to insist that understanding must precede judgment, and that Black fans deserve the same interpretive generosity extended to other fan communities. Recent scholarship has begun to address this gap; as Martin and Griffin (2024) argue, centering Black fans requires not only studying them but also challenging the field's foundational assumptions about what fandom looks like. Martin's (2025) recent book, based on interviews with seventy-five Black fans, demonstrates the sophistication with which Black audiences navigate their media consumption, understanding that visibility can be both a source of joy and a site of exposure to criticism.
[6.4] Writing this article has changed how I understand what I was doing that night in Charlotte. At the time, I was simply a fan, excited, present, caught up in the collective energy of the arena. I was not thinking about theory. I was not thinking about what it meant. I was wearing the green and feeling like I belonged. But the process of theorizing has revealed something I did not fully see in the moment: that my participation was not just about YoungBoy, or about Baton Rouge, or about the music. It was about accessing a version of myself that I do not often get to be. Younger, less burdened, less alone. The green headscarf gave me permission.
[6.5] It is still in my closet. I have not worn it since October. But I keep it, the way you keep a ticket stub or a wristband—proof that you were there, that you were part of something, that for one night in Charlotte you belonged to a world larger than yourself.