For a period of about four months in the summer of 2014, when cars screeched by blocks with windows rolled down and volume knobs twisted right until they twisted no more, America was Bobby Shmurda’s. It was a quiet year, a twelve-month-long industry-wide collective gulp of air before plunging into the breathless string of hip-hop releases that have punctuated 2015, and during these twelve months of pretty-good, “Hot Nigga” was a punch to the gut. But even as parties collectively raised their drinks and erupted into choruses of “get up out my trap house” deep into the iciness of November and December, Bobby Shmurda never had hip-hop like he had the rest of America.
This is nothing new. Last summer it was Bobby Shmurda, before Shmurda it was iLoveMakonnen, and before iLoveMakonnen it was Chief Keef, Lil B, and countless others. And for each of them and their predecessors there’s always been an uneasy, awkward, and always unstated sense that this must surely all be a joke — that everyone must be, at some level, kidding. For the vast majority of artists, this simply accelerates an inevitable regression to the mean, but for the real gems, the ones that thrive between the lines and defy classification and that deserve better than relegation to seven-second Vine soundtracks, this disconnect is potentially fatal.
There’s always been a refusal to consider whether Yung Lean has any appeal beyond the inherent humor behind watching an awkwardly proportioned eighteen-year-old Scandinavian rap in a bucket hat [1]. There’s always been a refusal to consider whether Future has any depth or skill beyond being able to compellingly and repeatedly tell you about how he fucks up commas [2]. There’s always been a wholesale refusal to consider whether a song can be repetitive and oddly humorous and helplessly catchy and simultaneously be skillful and genuinely good. It’s not even that artists are being held to an unreasonable standard, they’re being held to a nonsensical one. It’s like being angry at J Dilla because Donuts doesn’t bump hard enough in the whip.
This disconnect is particularly ironic and unfair in a world where J. Cole can make music videos where two dogs act out the gripping saga of his first time with a girl and get anointed as the second coming in the process [3], but the division between Bad and What Can Even Be Potentially Considered As Being Good has become increasingly murky. This, too, isn’t particularly surprising: that’s what tends to happen when you move an entire industry to a platform (streaming) that hosts the fundamental triviality of memes alongside sternly serious work and measures their success by the same metrics, and under these circumstances, the conception that catchiness and critical quality aren’t just separate but mutually exclusive is easy to adopt.
A full disclosure is in order here. Young Thug is not my objective favorite rapper (Nas) or my subjective favorite rapper (Kanye West) or even my current favorite rapper (Future), but in the last twelve months, I’ve logged more times on obscure Young Thug throwaways combed from HotNewHipHop.com than I have on Illmatic, Yeezus, or 56 Nights. I’m also interning for Young Thug’s label, 300 Entertainment, for the summer, so you can proceed through the rest of this piece with knowledge of that potential bias. But here, I submit that The Young Thug Question is not whether he is Good, full-stop, or Not Good, but whether he possesses a practically generational ability to seize music, and I also submit that phrased as such, the answer is very clear.
There are rappers, brilliant and transcendent rappers, that do exactly what’s expected of them. Not in the stick-to-the-script, smile-for-the-camera sense or even a broader creative sense, but in a very technical, elementary sense — they know exactly when a song calls for them to segue from snarl to drawl, when to hold back on a syllable for a half-second delay to land with a drum kick, when to wind up their pace and when to explode into double-time. They’re crowd-pleasers at the most fundamental tier, so fundamental that it hardly registers as an intentional choice (there are far more immediately compelling elements to hip-hop than a rapper’s rhythmic synchronization), but even if it’s a subconscious skill, it’s a commanding one. Rappers like Jay Electronica or Freddie Gibbs draw authoritative magnetism from it; you know exactly what they’re about to do because it’s the flip-to-the-back-check-it-in-the-answer-key correct thing to do but despite that, it’s executed so thoroughly impeccably that all you can do is shrug. There are incredible artists in hip-hop that never truly had it [4], so it’s not a non-negotiable requirement, but when it’s present, it’s present.
But the security in understanding and knowing precisely how Jay Electronica will dismantle a song, however dazzling it may be, is uncomfortable. It’s a predictable sort of brilliance, giving you assurance where musical experience has taught you to expect uncertainty. It’s juxtaposed against this type of brilliance that Young Thug’s volatility becomes so special. Young Thug’s unpredictability lives on several different tiers: he’s a criminal who wails his threats, and when you call him unpredictable you don’t mean it in a “what direction will he go next?” kind of way but in a “he might literally break out a ukulele for his next single” kind of way.
It also means that Young Thug’s music is unexpectedly dense, heavy, only rocketed along by a pace that too often translates into unintelligibility. He’s too fast to keep up with, too fast to identify patterns, and when you manage to form an expectation about how he’ll complete a bar he smashes it. This makes him difficult to listen to solo, and the whole Rich Gang exercise illustrated that in broad strokes: Rich Homie Quan or Birdman’s presence forces Thugger into a series of recognizable roles (the first verse or the hook or, more broadly, the foil to Quan), but when he’s alone, his abstractness can be overwhelming. Our ears are trained to search for certain things in music, like hooks, and Thug often refuses to abide those rules. But at his absolute thrilling technical best, like on “Givenchy”, it’s worth it — at one striking point, he even plays the old MF DOOM card of tossing out a red herring rhyme, rapping, “You should know me and sharp shooters sponsored by FOX/split the money up in eight ways like I’m an octopus”. Looking at a transcription of his lyrics is always disorienting: you recognize the vividness and momentary absurdity of his punchlines (“I’m the President, baby, blacker Barack,” he declares at one point in “Givenchy”), but how he possibly managed to rap the lines you see in the song that you know is difficult to understand. They don’t look like his lyrics, because everything you know about rap tells you that these words shouldn’t slot into the spaces allotted to them — to try and match the two is to try and shove something abstract into a concrete structure.
This is, largely, an encapsulation of the entire Young Thug Question: to evaluate Young Thug on the realism of his punchlines or his seriousness is to walk right by the point. It’s a logical method of judgment: the debt owed to Lil Wayne is obvious, for example, and he makes music with plenty of relatively straightforward Atlanta trap rappers who do relatively straightforward things with their voice and their music. But it’s a structural evaluation of a rapper whose entire style ignores the very conception of structure, dropping into extended hooks or leading into codas that don’t loop back to anything. When Thugger tells you he splits his money eight ways like an octopus, to knock points off for the simile’s ridiculousness is to miss what makes Young Thug Young Thug. Young Thug punchlines are not Lil Wayne punchlines: writer Andrew Nosnitsky noted once that Young Thug “is writing in a sphere closer to Ghostface or De La Soul than the modern-day trap stars he’ll inevitably be lumped in with,” and this is crucial. Thugger overloads you, refuses to give you a point of stability, snaps you back into focus with sharp, shocking moments of lyricism.
There’s a piece I started writing nearly a year ago off the heels of Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan and Metro Boomin’ running riot across Travi$ Scott’s Day Before Rodeo: it’s striking to read through the draft I had now, because a year ago, Thug was still a relative mystery. Still riding off the coattails of “Danny Glover” and “Stoner” and 1017 Thug, he’d left people grasping at offerings like Black Portland without a definitive project to latch onto — post-rise, all we’d had then was a string of features [5] that appeared dominant and impossible to escape. But go through them now and the progression is striking, because where he’d previously allowed his distinctiveness to flood his entire persona on a verse, he’s now learned a certain amount of restraint, an ability to hold back. His most definitive song, Rich Gang’s “Lifestyle”, is a perfect example: he let his wailing go too far, and the song suffers for it.
This is partly what makes Barter 6, his first true project after 1017 Thug from earlier this year, so important — it let Thug float. Until then, we’ve only seen his solo ability in flashes of hyper-concentrated focus, when he washed T.I. on “About the Money” or flipped Drake’s “The Language” with Metro Boomin’. Even Rich Gang wasn’t an ideal stage for Young Thug, because superficially, it’s easy to read Quan as the more deliberate and conventional (read: skilled) member of the duo and let Thugger’s manics become exciting moments of madness that exist primarily to be pulled back into reality by Quan — that’s largely been the issue with his feature-heavy presence, too, because as a featured artist Thug is more of an exhibit than anything else. In Barter 6, though, everything is on Thugger’s terms. Young Dolph and MPA Duke spit the verses of their lives, legends T.I. and Lil Boosie show up on the same track, even Birdman pulls out the stops for a song, but it’s all in Young Thug’s world. Thug gets to breathe, let his idiosyncrasies shift from sideshow to main act, and prove that he’s still an equally compelling artist. If Barter 6 wasn’t enough, the seventy-song-leak from early May proves the point [6]: he’s an artist that’s learned to sit back. He doesn’t plunge right into “Mine”, instead letting the song gather pace on its own, and “Got My Mind Right” is skeletal, throbbing, even slowing to complete silence at certain points. What this newfound maturity means for Young Thug is a powerful presence that’s no longer simply contained to Atlanta and the occasional radio hit, and his stunning turn on Jamie xx’s “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)” is a fitting mission statement in that regard. Much in the same way Drake’s appearance on SBTRKT’s remix to “Wildfire” in 2011 shifted him from “good rap artist” to “potential star”, Thugger’s profile is suddenly very, very different, and much in the same way that Drake has shed punchline status, the option to take Young Thug seriously or not is rapidly receding from sight.
It’s possible that this broader point of Thugger’s undeniability negates my more specific ones: if Young Thug is bound to be a star whether or not he’s taken seriously, perhaps it doesn’t particularly matter whether people recognize him as a legitimately exceptional rapper. But to me it does. It matters to me that Young Thug doesn’t end up grudgingly accepted, an inexplicable star churned out by an increasingly inexplicable industry, and it matters to me that I stop getting skeptical glances and “really? “Stoner” is seriously your favorite song of last year?”. While everyone around him is scrambling to decide whether they want to be Kendrick, Drake, or Chance, Young Thug is living in a different planet, an unbelievably talented rapper that’s making music without peer, and there’s not much more I can ask for.
[1] He does.
[2] He does.
[3] In reality, J. Cole’s entire fandom probably clings to him based on a desperate backlash against this entire phenomenon and the according need to find someone who raps okay over okay soul samples and keeps it sufficiently real. I don’t like J. Cole.
[4] There’s a decent argument that “All Day” is good primarily because it’s the first time in years that Kanye has really caught a beat, a skill that he promptly proceeded to lose with his next few features.
[5] Most notably Low Pros’ “Frankie Lymon”, Metro Boomin’s “Chanel Vintage”, Young Scooter’s “Drugs”.
[6] You can make at least two cohesive projects better than Barter 6 from these leaks. I know because I spent half an hour at 3AM doing this a week ago.