And that critic wasn’t wrong, but while Drake and 40 dabble in whatever sound of the moment they’re into with a mix of rapping and singing and sung raps, Young Thug has been quietly creating an entirely separate genre, a Dr. I remember when Thank Me Later was about to drop some critic who went to the listening party reported back: this is what we’ve been waiting for, the game changer that seamlessly incorporates a hybrid Rap and R&B. He reminds you that Method Man once became the king of New York by spitting nursery rhymes, only Thug is writing new ones. His silly tossed off 16s about women and money occasionally stumble into grace. There are times Thug appears to be tapping into an ancient sacred wellspring of melody closed off to man since The Gospels. Maybe they’re written or imagined and memorized, but they have the quality of spontaneity, as if God is speaking through a gangly, dreadlocked, heavily tattooed vessel. You would imagine with his at times complex analogies there is premeditation to his bars. On its face this sounds like I’m describing the worst pretentious indulgences of late Coltrane or John Cage but nothing could be further from Thug’s strange, ethereal music. His moment to moment to decisions on beat are the lottery, the weather, dropping a drug store rubber ball on cobblestone and trying to figure out the angle of the ricochet. His body of work is impossible to skim and the easiest thing to listen to in the world. He’ll drop out of hard triplet spit mid verse to slow to a crawl with a beautiful melody and cadence that could easily be the hook for a great Drake song but here is casually discarded like a styrofoam clamshell of gnawed chicken wings. It’s impossible to get your footing in the middle of a good Thug song and that is the thrill of listening to his music. I believe the only thing less predictable than how dice settle is his flow. You could apply the same lie in trying to understand the chaos of Young Thug.
It’s the myth that if you roll 3 consecutive numbers the fourth has to break that chain. It’s the assumption that the cold randomness of the universe conforms to narrative and pattern. There’s something called the Gambler’s Fallacy. But he’s so much more formally daring, really than anyone working in music at the moment. He has a penchant for Wayne and Kanye’s dumb-brilliance in his punchlines. He reminds me of vintage Ghost and Rae in the way he relates ideas and images through language that is being willfully misused and is nearly inscrutable to anyone but him, (though he’ll never make an “All That I Got Is You”). He doesn’t make songs, he makes tones, textures and colors. But even trapped out Nihilist Future can’t match the anarchy of Thug’s work because Nihilism is an ideology held by a terrestrial being with rationale and Thug simply has none. His counterpoint, sometimes rival, and now regular collaborator Future is often cited to as a peer - united by autotune and a love of the same drugs. Thug is pure being, a freak show alien super predator with acid for blood who has no God but instinct and visceral response. Designer clothes, his own greatness maybe? It truly doesn’t matter because his entire body of work is built around how he says it. What the fuck are Young Thug songs about? What does he believe in? What does he care about? Well, women for sure.
He’s Twain, Toni Morrison, Henry Rollins, the Manhattan Project: a true American original who is at once without precedent and totally in line with our histories and traditions. But really there is no context for Young Thug. Kelly and Beethoven into a garbage disposal and hit spin you could eventually scoop Thug out of the drain pipe. Influence is a funny thing but I guess if you tossed Lord Infamous, the Squad Up mixtapes, R. He’s one of the most unique artists rap has ever seen. I could say Thug is the most unique artist to emerge this decade, but it would be doing him a disservice. And if those two albums could conceive a child, their immaculate space baby would be 27 year old Jeffery Lamar Williams. You can trace the DNA sequence of the last ten years through these two seminal albums that radically changed the formal sound of Hip Hop, and forever opened it up to experimental lyrical weirdness. The two albums we’ll mention often are 808s & Heartbreaks and The Carter 3.
Young thug thief in the night series#
Something we’ll be discussing a lot in this series is mainstream Rap’s violent shift away from lyricism over the course of the last ten years. We can’t confirm or deny whether Abe Beame is geeked like an astronaut.
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