Paul Thompson might take a loss but bitch, he’d rather take his chances
Do you remember the single from the second Mike Jones album? Of course you don’t. “Mr. Jones” was released in September of 2006, debuting at #92 on Billboard and disappearing almost immediately after. You remember the beat, though—Lil Wayne repurposed it as “Ride 4 My Niggas” for Da Drought 3 the following year. So inescapable was Wayne’s gravity at the time that other rappers’ beats became entirely his own, the original voice forgotten, immaterial. Seven years later, Young Thug is not content to have the most memorable vocal takes: He is airbrushing other rappers out of existence.
The cover of his latest, unceremonious release, 1017 Thug 2, features the young Atlantan’s face photoshopped onto one of Wiz Khalifa’s press photos. This is probably not a carefully planned coup; one hanger-on or another was scrambling to upload the tape to Soundcloud between blunt rotations. But the effect is the same. Young Thug the person is a fleeting presence, coming and going in the form of wordless blog posts and whispers about his odyssey through label purgatory. He has no famous wife, no product endorsements, not even a concrete biography. Yet when he raps, Young Thug is the only rapper who matters. Never mind his two ubiquitous home runs—“Stoner” and the perpetual motion machine that is “Danny Glover”—Thugga has been a bottomless styrofoam cup of hooks and verses that warp and bend the confines of rap.
In a way, he could be seen as a natural extension of hip-hop’s (and particularly Atlanta’s) recent gravitation toward vocal experimentation. But Young Thug is not Future, or Rich Homie Quan, or any of the Migos. Nor, for that matter, is he Wayne, to whom he is compared in perpetuity. The Louisianan was a frequent experimenter with an endless arsenal of flows and voices, sure, but the insanity was doled put piecemeal—the listener could eventually catch up, which led to the legions of imitators from which we will never escape. Young Thug’s style is considerably more slippery, more challenging. Flows, vocal pitches, degrees of enunciation, or any other number of variables are liable to change three, four times in every verse. And he’s not just an oddity. Thugga has stitched all these remarkable tools together expertly. But 1017 Thug 2 is a frustrating listen. It’s a good, occasionally great record that illustrates nearly all of his many strengths, but it seldom strikes upon the magic that has made Young Thug the most vital, exciting rapper working today.
Paradoxically, the brief 36-minute affair is hampered by one of the things that makes Young Thug so consistently fresh. At his best, his music finds him rattling off shadowy images and half-formed thoughts. (“The Blanguage”, probably his best solo track this year, starts “I fucked her then wiped off my dick in the curtain inside of the Phantom.” The story stops there.) The stream of hyperconsciousness makes Thugga’s music feel spontaneous and mysterious in spite of the careful stylistic construction. His contradictions—the sensitive older brother might turn into the ruthless killer in eight bars—are made even more amusing, more bizarre by the lack of a coherent identity to anchor them. But on 1017 Thug 2, this facelessness grows tiresome. Exacerbated by the poor sequencing (“Warrior” is a dead end as a closer; there is no discernable arc even to the tracks’ tempos or intensity), it’s a problem that makes Thugga’s music feel disjointed in a bad way, perhaps for the first time.
And that lack of cohesion can’t quite be excused by a handful of world-beating tracks; here, there is nothing as undeniable as “Danny Glover” or “2 Cups Stuffed”. But the two best cuts—“1017 Lifestyle” and “Take It”—come close, bringing the chaotic, fatalistic energy Thugga trades in so often. The latter song in particular knocks around your head for hours after you first hear it. There must be something in the lean water in Atlanta, because no one else writes like this. Young Thug is and will probably forever be known first as a great rapper, but the way he constructs phrases is what makes his music so durable. It goes deeper than syntax—whose worldview could possibly inform a passage like “Even though I killed the pussy nigga, I hope he go to heaven/Your old lady’s hot, she’s hot, she’s hot like a fucking 9/11”?
What “Take It” also has is a trail of scattered reminders that Young Thug is in this world, but not of it. At his frenzied best, he’s like a Williams character, stepping outside the narrative to comment on our existence before dipping back to another plane entirely. The hook opens: “Let that chopper sing to her like Pandora/And I hope you got insurance on your daughter.” The shoehorned, roundly unsexy details (he also boasts about Oovooing with a girl) at first seem to undercut his menace, but by song’s end, they drive home his chief point: “I look crazy, I look cuckoo!” Young Thug has not yet put out a definitive piece of work, one that doubles down on his ungodly skill set, and 1017 Thug 2 doesn’t fix that. But even when it drags, the record doesn’t let you out of its author’s orbit. For forty minutes, Young Thug doesn’t have to be the best rapper—he’s the only rapper.
