September 28, 2015 Photo by: Bryan Woodland (Illustration)
Atlanta producer Dun Deal remembers when he first met a 16-year-old kid named Jeffrey Williams, now better known the rapper Young Thug. "He was always a cool person; he always dressed weird," says Deal, who helped craft Thug's first true viral hit, "Stoner". "And the way he used to write his music was pretty crazy. He would just draw what he wanted to do on paper. That's how he used to record; he would draw, like, a picture."
What kind of picture? "Weird signs and shapes," Deal says. "He'd be in the booth looking at the paper, and one day I went in there and looked at it and said, 'You didn't write any words down.' He looked at me and said: ‘I don't need no words.'"
How unpredictable can an artist be, and for how long? Widen the time frame—three minutes, a few months, years—and then consider who falls into that circle: This is as solid a measuring stick as you'll get for creative vision. Unpredictability over the long-term is almost impossible; the numbers relentlessly revert to mean. Watching Lil Wayne's career prospects dwindle over the last six years has been like watching an unpredictability graph shoot downward: Thrilling flights of imagination started to organize themselves into observable patterns, and when they did, Wayne promptly ceased being fascinating.
Young Thug has been an object of intrigue in the hip-hop community for about four straight years, and he isn't predictable yet. The possibilities of his art still multiply whenever he opens his mouth. Behavioral scientists have a word for this kind of prolonged unpredictability—chaos—and they apply it to weather systems, dripping faucets, boats rocking in high seas. Chaos isn't the absence of a pattern; it's a pattern too complex to discern—a math problem you cannot solve even when each step in the equation is right in front of you. So even when Young Thug would scribble out his theorems on a piece of paper using shapes and signs, his collaborators could only stare at it and scratch their heads.
Big innovations in rap tend to occur one seismic heave at a time, surfacing with a single new sound—Lex Luger's crisp trap drums, Mike WiLL Made It's aquamarine low-pass filters—before burying it. Young Thug has danced along this perilous wave for an impossibly long time. His music has shifted as nimbly as the details of his recording contracts, and while watching a series of industry heavy hitters try and fail to assimilate him into the mainstream over the last few years, I felt a certain pang of recognition: This is how it feels to listen to Young Thug, too.
In 2013, the year he released his breakout mixtape 1017 Thug, he was a four-color blur: "L-E-A-N-I-N-G! LEAN! LEAN! LEAN! LEAN!" he yelped on "2 Cups Stuffed", sounding uncannily like Mario jumping and hitting his head against a block for multiple coins. A year later, on Rich Gang's Tha Tour Part 1, he downshifted slightly, matching the polished and glistening sounds of producer London on Da Track's pianos. His lyrics were more legible, and that twist in focus yielded a real-life pop hit with "Lifestyle". But on April's Barter 6, he morphed yet again: The hook to "With That" is nearly subliminal—listening to it is like squinting at a distant figure you think is waving only to realize they're drowning. On "Constantly Hating", he frames his voice in near-silence, singing in smooth, rounded four-bar phrases that feel directly informed by dancehall toasting.
His newest mixtape, Slime Season, pulls from various corners of his leaked catalog and is filled with jagged exclamations that pop up in the middle of two-bar phrases. Odd, funny, crass images like "put some rims on the waterbed," or "you a wiener in a Beemer," or "her booty fat like she eat asses" feel like scraps of confetti that just happened to light on a beat. From "2 Cups Stuffed" to this point, a dozen or so skins have already been shed.
According to Young Thug's collaborators, he works quickly, often immediately. "Thug came up with the chorus melody to 'Lifestyle' the very first time he heard the beat, while we sat at our the kitchen making music," remembers London on Da Track. "He always knows what he wants: 'Them chords, right there. That clap, right there. With other people, they are still writing in the studio, still figuring things out. With Thug, the melody's just in him."
"When Thug hears a song, he knows how the whole shape of the thing goes," says Metro Boomin who has worked extensively with Thug. "He can nudge the whole frame to the left to make it offbeat and sound how he wants it to sound."
"Thug will go in there and hum a whole song," says Dun Deal. "Honestly, 'Stoner' probably took about 15 minutes to record. I had the beat partially done, and when he heard it, he was like, 'That's a hit. Let's do it. What should the song be about?' When he came up with the hook, it was over. It probably took two or three [takes] to get the whole song."
The idea that Young Thug's songs begin as muttering shapes, with melodies and peaks and valleys developing before words surface, comes up again and again in stories about him, though the reality seems more complicated than that. Because if you poke at the comet stream of his voice, it actually separates into particles of thick wordplay and slang: "If a nigga base loaded, we Red Sock ‘em," he raps, indelibly, on 1017 Thug's "Murder".
"This is the truth: Thug, more than anything, is a lyrical genius," says Dun Deal. "He can really just rap. But my favorite lines of his are the simplest ones, the details no one else thinks of focusing on or pointing out. Sometimes it's something so small, like that line from 'Stoner': 'We don't stand in line, foreign shoes hurt your feet.' You know, you can't be standing around in those damn Gucci shoes—that shit hurt! He raps about what's around him, and he actually kills it just by looking at stuff. If he's wearing a snake on his T-shirt, he'll probably rap about that."
"Working with Thug and working with Future feels the same," says Metro Boomin, whose signature tag—Thug yelling "Metro Boomin want some more, nigga!"—comes from a song with both Future on Thug on it. "They don't sound like each other, but their creative process and their level of talent is the same. Anybody who knows both of them would agree."
The comparison is telling, especially since Future has recently shrugged off the weight of pop-star expectation and become unpredictable again. Though the fellow Atlantan has tread a more earthbound path through the industry than Thug, a trio of mixtapes leading to this summer's Dirty Sprite 2 shook him free of the grid.
From their separate corners, these two artists are working with some similar tools and ideas. Both give the very strong initial impression that they are, quite literally, making up their music in real time, and rap listeners who gaze blankly at Thug and Future are usually reacting negatively to that idea: "What kind of gibberish is this?"
But the only thing that separates gibberish from language is, after all, understanding, and both Future and Thug sneak in lyricism under the cover of unintelligibility, one of hip-hop's oldest tricks. In Future's work, like Thug's, the hard walls that usually separate verses from choruses and make rap songs easily diagrammed are all vacated. "Fuck Up Some Commas", the street hit that reignited Future's career, takes place in what feels like a big empty room, just like Thug's "Constantly Hating".
When I interviewed Earl Sweatshirt, maybe hip-hop's preeminent writerly rapper, in February, he spoke of Future with reverence. "His one-liners are the craziest shit ever," he marveled. There are many ways to innovate in rap, but Thug and Future have chosen one of the most basic and upsetting methods: They are bending recognizable material into unrecognizable shapes, which might be the most basic hip-hop impulse. In fact, it might be the animating impulse of all pop art. If a piece of music makes you feel strange and confused, it's probably somebody else's pop.