Paul Thompson has no time for games cause he’s all grown up
It has been suggested of late that Young Thug is mired in the pits of major-label hell. That very well may be true, but if it is, Thugga seems intent on lying, cheating, and stealing to earn his ticket out. The past month has seen a deluge of features and solo tracks, many of them great, almost all of them released haphazardly, without warning. And on each and every one, the Atlanta upstart seems determined to push both the English language and his codeine tolerance to their limits.
“Treasure” arrives courtesy of “Stoner” architect Dun Deal; the song will appear on the producer’s upcoming B.A.S.S.: Beneath A Silver Sky. This time, he drenches the track in distorted synths that soften the snare rolls and brash low end borrowed from circa-2011 trap. Coupled with a chimed melody that imagines Lavender Town squarely in the middle of Zone 6, “Treasure” is a dizzy, eerie three-and-a-half-minute open question. It has all the non-sequitor invincibility and off-the-cuff honesty of a drunken, rambling voicemail you don’t remember leaving without any of the morning-after regret.
Zuse (whose Bullet is out now) is what happens when you take Jamaican dancehall, move it to Atlanta, add New York gangsta rap, and let marinate. The impulse from collaborators and fans is to deploy and read artists like Zuse as blunt instruments—just a stylistic flair added to a song, their voice a percussive element above all else. His verse here deserves more attention, and it would get more, at least in theory. Thug’s style is a gateway drug of sorts, pushing the listener to hang on the language with a completely open mind for the simple fear of missing something. It would be a great road into other unfamiliar territory. That is, if Thugga didn’t run away with the song.
At times, it sounds as if Young Thug is daring someone—the engineer, God, KRS-One—to come into the booth and give him a piece of their mind. Paradoxically slurred and precise, Thugga’s delivery barely conforms to the laws of physics. At times, he drags on the end of lines, extending them indefinitely and without losing momentum (“How the hell that nigga leave the treasure when the treasure bring the bezels and the bezels worth a foreign home?” is all one line, an uninterrupted thought). Laced blunts are an unqualified point of pride; Pimp C’s name is invoked in a lean endorsement without even a trace of commentary. The future might be cloudy, but Young Thug is stuck squarely in the present tense.
