Young Thug thread

wow this rules, what the hell

new EP is on spotify, elton sample included

This EP is good. I love the beat on "Real in My Veins." LODT was has always been my favorite producer for Thug.

As I see D-40 mentioned on Twitter, the discourse around this release/Thug's career is extremely boring (the Box Office Mojo-fication of music coverage is lamentable in general). I've been slowly reading Jesse McCarthy's n+1 piece on trap—which imo is pretentious in all the best ways but ymmv—so in contrast to that here's this:

Young Thug enacts a Charlie Parker theory of trap. Virtuosity, drugginess, genius, vulnerability, an impish childishness almost as a compensation for the overabundance of talent, the superfluidity of imagination. A Cocteau from East Atlanta, he teases the beat, skipping off it like a yo-yo, yodeling, crooning, blurting, squawking, purring, working his game on you, finessing, playing ad libs like Curtis Mayfield worked strings, or scatting and growling low like Louis Armstrong if he were sweating it out in a freestyle battle with James Brown, bouncing back and forth between personalities. His polymorphously perverse sexuality is so insistently graphic and deadpan that it has virtually zero erotic charge, au courant pimp talk channeled through a kind of private board game of his own imagination, a Candyland fantasia slimed in promethazine. By contrast, his persona oozes sex. In leather jackets, ultratight jeans and Janet Jackson piercing arrangements, he’s a Mick Jagger–ish rake on the make who is also shy and easily wounded, suddenly open for a hug. A favorite and telling picture posted to Instagram account thuggerthugger1 (5.2 million followers) captures him with his arm around Sir Elton John, posing like a polite politician in photo-op mode (Obama-alt) next to Sir Elton, who is dressed in a gold-trim Adidas tracksuit and a black thugger cap.

If the outlandish persona were all there was to it, he might be written off as a variant to Weezy that went nowhere. But the music really does, somehow, sound like the future, like something that’s never been tried before, a radical experiment. His concern for innovating, like his persistent concern for his kidney health, is a marker of identity, not just a lifestyle. The boundaries he pushes are only partly for our benefit; his chameleon love affair with the frisson of the louche, the lawless elasticity of language, and the plasticity of the self-fashioning body in motion is all of a piece. He insists on being the soloist and chorus all at once; his is an orchestral impulse, a surround sound lyricizing every inch of space on the track. Words aren’t about what they mean, but, in the spirit of Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus,” only how they sound. They are rhetorical and lyrical ammunition, raw material to freak like Jimi, not satisfied until the instrument wails, weirds out, trips over itself with a surplus that is no longer within respectable or even recognizable bounds — hence Thugger’s fundamental queerness in the most capacious sense of that word. Free spirit from day one: “When I was 12, my feet were so small I wore my sisters’ glitter shoes. My dad would whoop me: ‘You’re not going to school now, you’ll embarrass us!’ But I never gave a f —  what people think.” The music critic for the Washington Post writes that “if he lived inside a comic book, his speech balloons would be filled with Jackson Pollock splatters,” which is halfway there (why not Basquiat?). Thugger is more exciting than Pollock, who never wore a garment described by Billboard as “geisha couture meets Mortal Kombat’s Raiden” that started a national conversation. Thugger’s work is edgier, riskier, sans white box; if anything it is closer to Warhol in coloration, pop art without the pretension. It is loved, admired, hated, and feared by people who have never and may never set foot in a museum of “modern art.”

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-32/essays/notes-on-trap/

man idk that's pretty bad

i mean i'm probably not on that piece's wavelength tbh

lol no worries :) I might be alone in feeling nostalgic for 90s-ish academics-trying-be-hip cultural commentary

tbh I'd be up for reading just about anything that didn't start from the premise that dude has flushed his career down the toilet like we're all shareholders

why is so much hip hop discourse like that? I don't get it?

i am a shareholder in Young Thug Inc.

YTI is at underperform so you might want to explore your options

man idk that's pretty bad

― princess of hell (BradNelson), Wednesday, September 26, 2018 3:49 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

i think the new project is good enough but not touching the stuff from 2014-2016

last thing that really grabbed me was jeffery

selling my stock

A lot of writers are really invested in promoting the narrative of Young Thug as some unassailable creative genius, aren't they? All of those name drops in the n+1 piece are astounding, it almost reads like parody of the discourse that has surrounded him over the last 5 years or so.

n plus 1 sux

good Noisey interview with the engineer, interesting comments on the Rocket Man leak:

How hard of a secret is that to keep?
I actually hadn’t heard it until I got it for this project, which was after the leak. I don’t listen to any leaks. If I see it, I block whoever posted it and move on. It’s that upsetting where it’s like, I’d just rather not. So when someone wants to talk about it, I just block them and go about my day. It’s just easier. I would be angry all the time if that’s all I saw. I saw it briefly, and people were hitting me, and I was just like, I don’t know. It’s one of those situations where you hope it doesn’t ruin a great song and this time we didn’t let that happen. When it comes to songs leaking, it’s such a sore spot especially for us considering how many songs leaked in the past. I’m just happy this one made the cut. It’s such a big moment for him, that I’m glad he didn’t let people outside of the camp ruin it for him.

https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/ev7p9k/alex-tumay-young-thug-on-the-rvn-engineer-interview

He is awful live.

tbh many rappers in that genre are

unless you're there to mosh and party, then they're great

nah even for that he’s terrible

tbh many rappers in that genre are

― niels, Saturday, October 6, 2018 6:16 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I saw him live a couple of years ago and he was pretty good as far as I can remember.

new album (So Much Fun) just dropped

It has a song called 'Sup Mate' :'-D

Appropriate album title IMO

a lot of fun, indeed, but not enough weirdness imo. lots of highlights before it gets a bit bogged down by guest stars towards the end.

nav is truly terrible, idk why all the trap guys like him so much

what future song uses the exact flow as "lil baby"? this is killing me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeYG-tboiOU

oh yeah, just the single from his last album lol

album rules, much better than beautiful thugger girls

Yeah it's easily his best since Jeffrey (and his first #1 album too albeit almost all due to streaming) so the lack of discussion here is a little surprising.

yeah i've definitely come around on the album, tho idk if i like it more than BTG, which i liked more than most

it's a fun easy listen imo

really all of it ranges from pretty good to great except for that track with nav

"what's the move"!!!! what a song

I like it but I haven't really found anything that jumps out too much compared to Jeffery and BTG. Production is solid but not that interesting, as is Thugger's delivery

Qualifier 75!

1 Kool Keith/Tom Waits! https://t.co/luuAnkl2GI
2 Young Thug/Rich Homie Quan! https://t.co/IrJJGu5hK0
3 Clipping/La Chat! https://t.co/FlK0aK8CVU
4 Body Count/Riley Gale! https://t.co/QCoV0mpXJD

— World Cup Of Duets (@peoples_pop) October 11, 2020

some serious injustice happening here

uh

Young Thug says he hasn’t worked with Andre 3000 because he feels Dre looks down on the new generation.

I feel like Thug made that up in his head.

🤷🏿‍♂️🤷🏿‍♂️🤷🏿‍♂️

pic.twitter.com/NFWubhSACG

— Justin L. Hunte 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@TheCompanyMan) November 27, 2020

This guy really fell off, huh?

Weird. Maybe for Thug it’s a matter of “This particular thing is so uncannily close to my wheelhouse im going to dismiss it outright” or something. Seems irrational and very surprising

he had some solid gunna collabs this year but im not entirely sure if he fell off because his one album of 2020 was a full-length collaboration with chris brown and i will never ever listen to that

This guy really fell off, huh?

― Jouster, Thursday, December 10, 2020 4:00 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

he had a top 10 hit lol

yeah it's pretty inarguable that he's more popular than he's ever been

tho it is true he just hasnt released a ton of music the last couple few years

I'm honestly a little grateful to have gotten a bit of a respite from new music from Thugger, from like 2015-2019 it was like a full-time job keeping up with him.

wonder what hes been doing

evol j otm, by the time BTG came out I was p satiated with him, but there's stuff from that absurdly productive period I prob still haven't heard

gunna's "dollaz on my head" and aminé's "compensating" are his guest verses most worth searching for this year imo

ooh, his spot on dababy's "blind" is nice too