At a time when the game is dominated by 30-something rappers, we sometimes forget that hip-hop is the music of the youth.

Twenty-year-old Fashawn’s debut album, the Exile-produced Boy Meets World, represents that vital element, telling the story of a young man from Fresno, California, trying to avoid poverty’s pitfalls and rise above his circumstances. On “Intro,” the album’s opening skit, young ’Shawn turns down a chance to hustle for a shot at a rap career, before bragging about his ferocious flow (“I can turn a whole metropolis into a peninsula/Ink-pen emperor, slang remain infinite”) over Exile’s chopped-up organ and swollen bass groove.