Young Thug

Latest Release

Essential Albums

  • So Much Fun (Deluxe)
    So Much Fun (Deluxe)
    So Much Fun (Deluxe)

    There aren’t many rappers who can claim to have the stylistic influence that Young Thug has had—a fact that may or may not have slowed the once prolific artist’s rate of output. Never lacking in feature work, the majority of Thug’s career saw him release multiple projects annually before dropping the Future collaboration SUPER SLIMEY and the YSL Records showcase Slime Language in 2017 and 2018, respectively. A little more than halfway through 2019, Thugger awards his fans’ patience with So Much Fun, an album that not only reminds us what we’d been missing, but one whose title seems to speak directly to the experience of creating it. Thug sounds elated to be making music across So Much Fun, unloading quirky stream-of-consciousness bars like rounds from one of the many guns he so often cites. “I put on my brothers, I put on my bitch/Had to wear the dress, ’cause I had a stick,” he raps on “Just How It Is”. He gets explicit on “Lil Baby”, telling us, “She put my cum in her cup like it was shake/I’ll never fuck this bitch again, it was a mistake,” but also proclaims via “Ecstasy”, “I don’t wanna talk about no hoes with my dad.” Fair. The production on So Much Fun, along with the way Thug processes it, is based in trap but equally indebted to video game scoring and some unplaceable fantasy world. Frequent collaborators like Wheezy and Southside, as well as friend and former tourmate J. Cole, have pushed themselves to their weirdest in attempts to keep up with Thug’s vocal experiments. Here, they include playing with British slang (“Sup Mate”), aping Louis Armstrong’s singing voice (“Cartier Gucci Scarf”) and punctuating bars with Michael Jackson-reminiscent ad-libs (“Light It Up”). The MC is very clearly in his bag on So Much Fun, something that we might attribute to the peace he may have found as one of rap’s most revered innovators. He alludes to this himself on “Jumped Out the Window”, rapping, “I been in the top room at Tootsie’s, they ain’t stunt me/They know I got money, and I don’t want nothing.”

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About Young Thug

You don’t get a lot of warning for an artist like Young Thug. From his warped delivery to his radical, gender-fluid fashion sense, the Atlanta rapper (born Jeffery Lamar Williams in 1991) flies in the face of every unspoken rule for what hip-hop is, should, and could be. Starting with a prolific run of mixtapes in the early 2010s, Thug rose by pioneering a weird, ever-shifting flow somewhere between singing, rapping, mumbling and squawking—pushing rap forward by pulling it apart. But the weirdest thing about what he does is that it works: Nearly every project Thug’s released since 2015—from the reggae-inflected JEFFREY to the country-ish sides of Beautiful Thugger Girls—has cracked the mainstream, laying the groundwork for a new crop of fellow eccentrics like Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. In other words, Thug hasn’t adjusted to convention but brought convention to him. Genuinely experimental, he frames his process in modest terms: “I’m in the studio so much, I’ll just try stuff,” he told The FADER in 2013. “I just think and try, think and try.”

HOMETOWN
Atlanta, GA, United States
BORN
16 August 1991
GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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