Young Thug is free. I’m happy. I listen to his music a lot. I’ve been collecting his songs for years. I think it’s time that I shared my collection in celebration. On this playlist are moments where Thug sings perfect hooky pop (eg. “Killed Before,” “My Jeans”), moments where he raps ceaselessly in a hidden pocket of the beat (eg. “Road Rage”, “Oh U Went”), and all over more than anything else, moments where he manipulates his voice qua instrument to breathtaking effect (eg. “Feel It,” “Harambe,” and so many more). He sounds like an electric eel, energy coursing through him as he curls and ripples through murky waters. This is what Young Thug does better than anyone. I’m still always sifting through his immense discography, but so far these are the moments when I feel that he has been at his best. When he’s been at his most free.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to “Just Might Be,” the closer on what essentially serves as Thug’s debut album, the syrupy, snappy, and utterly gorgeous Barter 6. This isn’t just my favorite Thug song; it’s one of my favorite songs period. We begin with a backdrop of Wheezy’s choral pads—half ghostly, half angelic—over which Thug hurdles straight into a near-quantized chorus of sixteenth note triplets. It's an impressive control of rapid diction. But don’t let this fool you as to the song’s range. In the first verse, he starts to stretch out into his iconic elasticity, yawning into the beat like a cat finding a sun patch. I used to hear Thug’s music referred to a lot as ‘post-verbal,’ but I kind of think the opposite. He’s often pre-verbal. To hear him at his most freed is to hear the cosmic genesis of his expression midway through.
I read once about how Michael Jackson would raise his hand into the air, grabbing at something only he could hear, humming little scraps of melody which would later turn into songs. Halfway through this verse, we hear Thug do the same thing. He reaches the conclusion of a flow, shrieks an ad-lib, and then emits a little wordless tune (1:06). In the next bar, the idea has morphed into rhythmic sound which is almost meaning-bearing, but more so syllabic play. It’s something like, “I’ll bibbity-bop, then stick it and fade.” And in the third bar, he’s back to making as much sense as he ever does, new flow in hand. Witnessing this process feels, I dunno, intimate to me.
Before the next verse, we hear his potential energy as pure moans and pants. This turns into kinetic, chest-beating couplets. He’s not done transforming. By the end of the verse, he’s gritting his teeth through what sounds like a “Runaway”-vocoder-outro stretch of desperation so raw it’s better expressed through its own obfuscation. I don’t mean to say that Thug is only interesting when he never arrives at actual symbolic expression through language. What he ends up saying in his raps can be at turns banal, head-scratching, outlandish; but not uncommon are moments of clear-headed concision. If you listen here for example, he’s snarling out micro stories of loyalty (“I swear these hoes piranhas, excluding my baby mama”) and betrayal (“If I ain’t treat you good lil’ baby just know it’s karma/You did my n**** wrong, I know it, it was last summer”) that I will argue any day pack as much punch as Hemmingway’s baby shoes thing.
Who knows if this pre-verbal energy transfer stuff is even “true.” Thug, like many rappers these days, 'punches in’ his songs, freestyling and tweaking on the fly as his engineer cuts and pastes the best parts. So I don’t know, for instance, if those three bars in the first verse even happened in sequence. I’m narrativizing. But there’s something about this man that makes him so ripe for myth-making. It could very well just be that it takes a brilliantly weird man to make brilliantly weird art. I don’t know if it’s true that Thug goes days without eating, and that when he does eat it’s mostly vending machine chips. I don’t know if it’s true that Thug draws pictures of Anime characters before stepping in the booth, reading the shape of the lines as rhythmic and melodic cues. But I’ve read those things.
It all feels akin to the clips of his trial when lawyers tried to pull truthful evidence from his raps, and Thug would just bob his head along to his art. There is only so much one can do to try to squeeze fact from myth. There is only so much one should do. Though one thing has now been made clear. And it shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone. That the man with 10 siblings raised in a Section 8 project in Atlanta, who was sent to juvie for four years in middle school after breaking his teacher’s arm, who then dropped out of high school and had his first child at 17, admitted to still being involved in networks of harm. Did we think that with millions of dollars, Thug would suddenly pop himself completely free from a world of violence? It doesn’t really work like that.
It’s pretty obviously important that our legal system casts scrutiny and finds out what people are actually up to when lives are at stake. But for my part, I’d like to keep only a lazy eye on the rest of this man. Give him some room to exist on his own terms. I’m comfortable imagining that within the energetic core of his being, he can convert cheetos into electric current. I’m comfortable imagining him surfing forever just beyond the shores of our logical comprehension. I want him to be magic. And suffice it to say that he just might be.
Thanks for reading!
