At 27 years old, BigXthaPlug has accomplished what most independent rappers spend entire careers chasing — a No. 4 debut on the Billboard Hot 100, a No. 1 on Hot Country Songs, and a Beyoncé co-sign — all without ever signing to a major label.
That last part is worth holding onto. Because everything about Xavier Landum’s story runs against the industry’s conventional wisdom on how success is supposed to happen.
He grew up surrounded by street life. He lost a Division I football scholarship over a marijuana charge. He robbed drug dealers in Austin because minimum wage wasn’t enough. He sat in solitary confinement and wrote rap lyrics on jail-issued medical forms. He missed his son’s first birthday because he was incarcerated.
And then, systematically and with considerable discipline, he built one of Southern hip-hop’s most compelling careers out of all of it.
Quick Bio
| Detail | Information |
| Full Name | Xavier Landum |
| Stage Name | BigXthaPlug |
| Date of Birth | May 12, 1998 (famousbirthdays.com lists May 11; Wikipedia and most sources confirm May 12) |
| Age (2025) | 27 years old |
| Birthplace | Pleasant Grove, Dallas, Texas, USA |
| Zodiac Sign | Taurus |
| Nationality | American |
| Height | Approximately 5’10″–6’1″ (sources vary; 5’10″/178 cm most cited) |
| Weight | Approximately 210 lbs / 95 kg |
| Education | Ferris High School (Ferris, Texas); briefly Crown College (Laketown Township, Minnesota) |
| Label | UnitedMasters (independent distribution) |
| Publisher | Sony Music Publishing |
| Children | Son Amar (b. approx. 2019); daughter Leilani (toddler as of 2025) |
| Active Years | 2019–present |
| Estimated Net Worth | $1.5–$2 million (2025) |
| Social Media | Active on Instagram, YouTube (1.5M+ subscribers), TikTok |
A Note on His Birthday
Two dates circulate for BigXthaPlug’s birthday — May 11 and May 12, 1998. Wikipedia, Sony Music Publishing records, and the majority of verified sources confirm May 12. FamousBirthdays.com lists May 11. This article uses May 12 as the working date, consistent with the most frequently cited and editorially sourced documentation.
One detail all sources agree on: the birth year is 1998, making him 27 as of 2025.
See also “Abraham Quiros Villalba — The Man Behind the Words Millions Read Without Knowing His Name“
Where He Came From: Pleasant Grove and Commerce, Texas
Xavier Landum was born in Pleasant Grove, a neighborhood in the southeastern corner of Dallas that has long carried one of the city’s more challenging reputations.
His parents lived what he has described as a street life — a detail that shaped his earliest memories with a directness most children never experience. He has spoken publicly about witnessing a moment in early childhood, around age four or five, where his mother drew a firearm against someone attempting to rob them.
By age nine, he moved from Dallas to Commerce, a smaller city roughly 65 miles northeast of the metroplex, to live with his father. Commerce offered a different environment — less urban intensity, more open space — but the experiences of his first decade had already made a permanent imprint on how he understood the world.
He struggled in school, frequently skipping classes and getting into fights. The pattern was consistent enough to suggest that formal education’s structure had little grip on him. What did hold his attention was football.
The Football Chapter That Ended in Minnesota
BigXthaPlug was a genuinely promising football player.
His performance at Ferris High School in Ferris, Texas, where he graduated in 2016, attracted attention from Division I college programs. The University of Minnesota reportedly recruited him — but his grades were insufficient to meet academic eligibility requirements. Rather than lose the opportunity entirely, he enrolled at Crown College in Laketown Township, Minnesota, a small private Christian institution, with a plan to raise his GPA and transfer to the University of Minnesota within a season.
The plan failed quickly.
Homesick and, by his own account, one of very few Black students on the campus, he self-medicated with marijuana. Crown College discovered marijuana in his dormitory room and expelled him. His collegiate football ambitions ended at that point — not gradually, but immediately.
He moved to Austin with his girlfriend, who was pregnant with their son. He briefly worked at a pawn shop. The work was steady and legal, but it paid minimum wage and offered nothing close to the future he had imagined from a football field.
He left the pawn shop. He bought a gun from it first.
Incarceration: The Period That Built the Artist
What happened next is documented across multiple interviews and in BigXthaPlug’s own music, with enough consistency to treat it as confirmed biography rather than mythology.
Unable to find stable employment and responsible for an infant son, he began robbing drug dealers — people, he reasoned, who would not file police reports. The logic of the street is rarely as clean in practice as it appears in theory. He was arrested on a warrant for aggravated robbery just before his 18th birthday.
He violated probation two years later and returned to custody. He was present in a cell, not present in his son’s life, on the day Amar turned one year old.
In 2022, a weapons and marijuana possession charge put him back in custody again. This time, his behavior landed him in solitary confinement.
Four walls. No distractions. A jail-issued medical form and a pen.
He began writing lyrics. Not casually, not as a pastime — but with the focused intensity of someone who had finally located the one thing that felt like purpose. Those sessions in solitary produced the first drafts of what would eventually become a recording career.
The First Steps and the Release of “Bacc From the Dead”
BigXthaPlug released his debut mixtape, Bacc From the Dead, in December 2020 — roughly a year after his release from his most recent incarceration.
He funded the early studio time by continuing to hustle on the streets. That is not a romantic detail. It reflects the practical reality that building a recording career requires money, and he had none coming from a label or a streaming advance.
The mixtape circulated within Dallas and online without generating national attention. But it established a presence and a sound — a deep, distinctively textured voice delivering street narratives that felt lived rather than constructed.
He partnered with UnitedMasters, the Brooklyn-based independent distribution company, in 2021. The choice was deliberate. UnitedMasters operates on a model that lets artists retain ownership and creative control — a priority for someone who had built his entire approach around authenticity.
In 2022, he released the single “Texas.”
“Texas”: The Song That Changed Everything
“Texas” did something unusual for a rap song in 2022.
It layered an acoustic country slide guitar beneath a trap arrangement and put BigXthaPlug’s unmistakable voice — a deep, twang-edged bass that carries both menace and warmth — over the top. The result sounded like something that had always existed but had never been properly recorded: authentic Texas rap, rooted in the state’s actual musical geography rather than borrowing from either coastal hip-hop or Nashville.
The song went viral on TikTok. The music video accumulated over 62 million YouTube views. The RIAA certified it Gold — a milestone that represents over 500,000 units in combined sales and streaming equivalents.
“Texas” also caught the attention of people BigXthaPlug had not been targeting: Morgan Wallen contacted him. Luke Combs expressed interest. Jelly Roll reached out. Post Malone signaled he was paying attention.
Country music had noticed a Dallas rapper. That development, improbable on paper, would define the next phase of his career.
AMAR: The Debut Album Named for His Son
Amar arrived in February 2023.
The album’s title is also his son’s name — the first and most visible signal that this was not an attempt to construct a commercial persona, but to document a specific human life. The 13-track project combined gospel, trap, blues, and country elements with features from Tay Money, Erica Banks, and Sauce Walka.
BigXthaPlug signed a publishing deal with Sony Music Publishing in 2023, a significant validation from the industry’s infrastructure. He also launched his own label, 600 Entertainment, that year — signing Dallas rappers Ro$ama and Yung Hood.
The Don’t Mess With Texas Tour followed. He was performing in venues, not just releasing music.
His son Amar, for whom the album was named, was later publicly revealed to have autism. In April 2025, BigXthaPlug filmed a video with the Autism Society of America as part of Autism Acceptance Month, discussing his relationship with his son. The gesture was not promotional in any conventional sense. It was a father being honest about something hard.
Take Care (2024): Consolidating the Breakthrough
His second album, Take Care, arrived in 2024 and debuted at number eight on the Billboard 200.
The album contained “Mmhmm,” which entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 93 and climbed to number 65. It also contained “The Largest” — a track whose self-assured confidence Beyoncé later used as an interlude on her Cowboy Carter world tour.
That last detail requires a pause. Beyoncé, touring one of the most commercially and culturally significant albums in recent memory, selected a BigXthaPlug track to frame a moment in her set. She did not announce a formal collaboration. She simply chose the music. For an independent artist distributed through UnitedMasters without a major label structure, that kind of recognition is not purchased — it is earned.
Billboard named BigXthaPlug the 2025 Country Power Players Innovator. The award preceded his third album by several months, functioning as both recognition of where he had been and a signal of where he was headed.
“All the Way” and the Country Pivot That Topped Two Charts
In April 2025, BigXthaPlug released “All the Way” featuring Bailey Zimmerman.
The song debuted at number four on the Billboard Hot 100 — his first top-ten entry on the all-genre chart. It simultaneously debuted at number one on Hot Country Songs, becoming the first number one of his career on any Billboard chart. It opened atop the Streaming Songs and Digital Song Sales charts in the same week, generating 24.1 million official U.S. streams in its debut seven-day period.
Billboard described it as “the biggest-debuting country/hip-hop teamup of early 2025.”
The collaboration had taken eighteen months to complete. Zimmerman, already an established country hitmaker, had heard BigXthaPlug was building a country project and reached out. The song arrived fully formed in his inbox. It required no significant revision.
“All the Way” functions as a break-up narrative — a trap ballad with Zimmerman’s country hook wrapped around BigXthaPlug’s measured, bruising verses. The emotional content is direct. The production, handled by BigXthaPlug’s regular collaborators Tony Coles, Bandplay, and Charley Cooks, makes no apologies for what it is: two genres, treated with equal seriousness, in service of a specific feeling.
I Hope You’re Happy (2025): The Album That Made the Case Complete
I Hope You’re Happy, BigXthaPlug’s third studio album, was released August 22, 2025, through UnitedMasters.
The project took eight months to record — his longest creative process yet — and features Jelly Roll, Luke Combs, Darius Rucker, Shaboozey, Ella Langley, Post Malone, Thomas Rhett, Bailey Zimmerman, Tucker Wetmore, and Ink. The track list spans eleven songs. Thematically, it moves between heartbreak, grief, self-reflection, and the specific joy of watching a child grow.
BigXthaPlug is also a father to a toddler daughter, Leilani, whose arrival adds a second layer of paternal experience to an album already shaped by his relationship with his autistic son Amar.
Rolling Stone gave the album three out of five stars, describing it as “a temperature check for where country is in the back half of 2025.” Billboard’s Michael Saponara praised BigXthaPlug’s ability to merge hip-hop with country authenticity, citing “Pray Hard” with Luke Combs and “Box Me Up” with Jelly Roll as standout tracks.
The music video for “Home” featuring Shaboozey shut down a Dallas street during filming. That is not a metaphor.
The Business Architecture Behind the Music
BigXthaPlug’s decision to work with UnitedMasters rather than sign with a major label is not incidental to his career. It is the career.
He retained ownership of his masters. He retained creative approval over every release. When Atlantic Records provided additional radio promotion for “All the Way,” that support came as a targeted partnership — not a long-term contractual obligation that would redirect his earnings or restrict his decisions.
His UnitedMasters partnership manager, Joshua Weiss, described the approach plainly in a Billboard interview: “We’re not mashing together genres for the sake of it. We’re creating something that captures every aspect of his identity as a person and an artist.”
The result, commercially, is an artist earning between $1 million and $1.5 million annually by 2025 estimates — with a net worth of approximately $1.5 to $2 million — without ever having transferred ownership of his music to a major label.
His own imprint, 600 Entertainment, adds an entrepreneurial dimension to the financial picture. He is not only an artist. He is building infrastructure for other artists from Dallas.
What He Actually Sounds Like
Describing BigXthaPlug’s voice to someone who has not heard it is genuinely difficult.
It sits low — not artificially pitched, but naturally deep in a way that carries both authority and intimacy. His delivery has the cadence of someone who has been telling stories his whole life and learned early that the story matters more than the performance of telling it. There is a twang running through it that connects to his Texas upbringing without being performed or exaggerated.
SPIN magazine’s review of Amar described it well: a voice and writing style that detail the textures of street life — moving weight, doing time, the mechanics of criminal logic — while simultaneously reaching toward something better. The darkness and the aspiration coexist because they coexisted in his actual life.
He is not an artist who references the streets from a distance, constructing a credibility persona after the fact. He is someone who lived it, documented it in lyrics written on medical forms in a solitary confinement cell, and then refused to let that be the end of his story.
The Complexity He Carries
BigXthaPlug’s biography contains real harm — not just harm done to him, but harm he did.
Robbing drug dealers is still robbery. Aggravated robbery is a serious charge that carries serious consequences and causes real damage to real people. He was arrested multiple times. He violated probation. He carried illegal weapons.
These are not glamorized in his music or in this article. They are facts, and they belong to a complete account of who he is and where he came from.
What is also true is that he stopped. He redirected. He built something meaningful from what remained after the worst of it. His son’s autism has become a cause he advocates for publicly. His daughter Leilani is being raised by a father who is present in her life in ways his past almost prevented.
That arc — genuine wrongdoing, genuine consequence, genuine change — is rarer in both music and in life than the genre’s convention of unexamined street mythology tends to acknowledge.
Where He Stands at 27
At 27, BigXthaPlug has three studio albums. He has multiple RIAA certifications — Gold for “Texas,” platinum for Take Care. He has appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 with collaborators including Lil Wayne, Post Malone, Jelly Roll, Bailey Zimmerman, and Shaboozey. He has performed at Coachella. He has been featured on a Beyoncé tour. He has been nominated for Best New Artist at the iHeart Radio Music Awards.
He has done all of this through UnitedMasters, without the infrastructure of a major label deal.
He is also, by any reading of the evidence, only partway through whatever his career is going to become. A rapper who debuted at number four on the Hot 100 with his first country crossover single — in a country music moment already oversaturated with genre-bending attempts — has not peaked. He has demonstrated that the ceiling is higher than anyone originally estimated.
Final Words
Xavier Landum wrote his first real rap lyrics on a medical form in a cell where he had been sent because his behavior in the general prison population was considered too disruptive to manage.
That is the origin point. Not a YouTube bedroom video. Not a SoundCloud account at 16. A medical form. Solitary confinement. Anger converted, slowly and deliberately, into craft.
The music he has made since that moment — across three albums, a Sony publishing deal, a Beyoncé co-sign, and a Billboard chart debut at number four — reflects someone who understood, in a very specific and unromantic setting, that he had one serious option remaining.
He took it seriously. The evidence is on the charts.
FAQs
1. How old is BigXthaPlug in 2025?
BigXthaPlug — real name Xavier Landum — is 27 years old in 2025. He was born in Dallas, Texas, on May 12, 1998. His birthday falls under the Taurus zodiac sign.
2. What is BigXthaPlug’s real name?
His legal name is Xavier Landum. He adopted the stage name BigXthaPlug when he began recording seriously after his release from incarceration. The “X” references his given name Xavier; “tha Plug” reflects street slang for a reliable supplier — in his framing, a reliable source of authentic music.
3. Where is BigXthaPlug from?
He was born in Pleasant Grove, a neighborhood in southeastern Dallas, Texas. In his teenage years, he moved to Commerce, Texas, roughly 65 miles northeast of Dallas, to live with his father.
4. What happened with BigXthaPlug and football?
He was a promising high school player who attracted Division I attention from the University of Minnesota. Unable to meet academic eligibility requirements, he enrolled at Crown College in Laketown Township, Minnesota, to raise his GPA. He was expelled after marijuana was discovered in his dormitory, ending his collegiate football ambitions permanently.
5. Why was BigXthaPlug in prison?
He faced multiple incarcerations. His first arrest came just before his 18th birthday for aggravated robbery — he had been robbing drug dealers in Austin after losing his football path. He later violated probation and returned to custody, missing his son Amar’s first birthday. In 2022, a weapons and marijuana possession charge resulted in another incarceration, during which a behavioral incident placed him in solitary confinement — the environment where he began writing lyrics seriously.
6. What was BigXthaPlug’s debut project?
His debut mixtape, Bacc From the Dead, was released in December 2020. His debut studio album, Amar, followed in February 2023. Amar was named after his son and included the Gold-certified single “Texas.”
7. What is “Texas” by BigXthaPlug?
“Texas” is a 2022 single that became his breakthrough track. It blended acoustic country slide guitar with Southern rap production and BigXthaPlug’s distinctive deep voice. The music video surpassed 62 million YouTube views. The RIAA certified it Gold, signifying over 500,000 combined sales and streaming equivalents. It also introduced him to country music’s audience and artists.
8. What happened with BigXthaPlug and Beyoncé?
Beyoncé selected BigXthaPlug’s song “The Largest” — a self-assured track from his second album Take Care — as an interlude during her Cowboy Carter world tour. The selection was not a formal collaboration or paid placement; it was a creative choice by Beyoncé’s team that significantly amplified his profile.
9. How did “All the Way” with Bailey Zimmerman perform on the charts?
Released on April 4, 2025, “All the Way” debuted at number four on the Billboard Hot 100 — BigXthaPlug’s first top-ten entry on the all-genre chart. It simultaneously debuted at number one on Hot Country Songs, his first chart-topper on any Billboard chart. The song generated 24.1 million official U.S. streams in its opening week and topped the Streaming Songs and Digital Song Sales charts simultaneously.
10. What is BigXthaPlug’s third album?
I Hope You’re Happy was released on August 22, 2025, through UnitedMasters. Jelly Roll, Luke Combs, Darius Rucker, Post Malone, Shaboozey, Ella Langley, Bailey Zimmerman, Thomas Rhett, Tucker Wetmore, and Ink collaborated on the 11-track country-rap album. Thematically, it centers on heartbreak, resilience, and fatherhood.
11. Does BigXthaPlug have children?
Yes — two. His son Amar, born approximately 2019, has autism; BigXthaPlug has spoken publicly about their relationship and filmed a video with the Autism Society of America in April 2025. He also has a toddler daughter, Leilani, who appears in his public life and influences the emotional content of his most recent album.
12. Is BigXthaPlug signed to a major label?
No. He distributes exclusively through UnitedMasters, an independent distribution company based in Brooklyn, New York. He also holds a publishing deal with Sony Music Publishing. He has retained ownership of his masters and maintains creative control over his output. “All the Way” received additional radio promotion from Atlantic Records as a targeted partnership, but BigXthaPlug has not signed a traditional major label deal.
13. What is BigXthaPlug’s estimated net worth?
His net worth is estimated between $1.5 million and $2 million as of 2025, based on recorded music revenue, touring income, streaming royalties, and his 600 Entertainment label. His annual income is estimated between $1 million and $1.5 million for 2025.
14. What is 600 Entertainment?
600 Entertainment is BigXthaPlug’s own record label, launched in 2023. He has signed Dallas-based rappers Ro$ama and Yung Hood to the imprint, adding an entrepreneurial dimension to his career beyond his own recording output.
15. What awards and recognition has BigXthaPlug received?
Billboard named him the 2025 Country Power Players Innovator. He was nominated for Best New Artist at the 2025 iHeart Radio Music Awards. He has performed at Coachella, Dreamville Festival (J. Cole’s event), Stagecoach (brought out by Jelly Roll), SXSW, Governor’s Ball, and American Airlines Center in Dallas.
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