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Travis Scott famously cribbed Thug’s Pick Up the Phone for one of his first huge solo hits, and it’s obvious that the Houston rapper’s ad-libs, vocal pitch and melodies are derived from Thug, albeit blended with 808s and Yeezus-era Kanye). That said, there is an argument that the first half-generation of Thug-influenced rappers have already transformed his innovations into something singular. It’s built on puppy-dog romanticism that could have come from Motown… if it were hijacked by a 6-foot-4-inch nose-ringed, gambling-obsessed, ex-high school quarterback from the slums. Like all of Thug’s best work, the track is resistant to critical rambling. Even on his first notable project, 2011’s I Came From Nothing 2, he remains in thrall to his hero, though songs like Keep In Touch revealed his limitless potential.
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Listening to Thug’s first mixtapes from the beginning of the decade, the dragon-in-couture croak and Jabberwocky rhyme schemes that followed are absent. The old rap line held that no biting was allowed was summed up by Wu Tang Clan’s Raekwon: “I don’t want no one sounding like me on no album.” A more equanimous view came from TS Eliot: “Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Even someone as revolutionary as Thugger couldn’t have existed without his acknowledged idol, Lil Wayne, whose slurred codeine hexes splintered rap’s possibilities in a thousand directions. The difference between homage, imitation, and apprenticeship may remain forever murky. The conventional narrative around Thug’s convention-melting screeches and warbles always considered him far too extraterrestrial, idiosyncratic, and hostile to the promotional demands required to become the chart-topping festival-headlining star that his talent warranted. In the early 2010s Thug emerged from Atlanta, the city that has largely set the tone for hip-hop across this decade. And yet, Thugga's most impressive legacy is his army of imitators young artists who discovered that there's money and fame to be made from idiosyncratic rhymes and unconventional sounds. It’s his answer to Lil Wayne’s career-defining Tha Carter III, a smartly-constructed distillation of his appeal – more coronation than a classic – diluting his berserk experimentation in favour of a restrained fluorescent joy that could appeal to suburban teens discovering vape pens and rap for the first time.Īs well as topping the album chart, he briefly occupied 11 spots on the Billboard Hot 100, including his Post Malone collaboration, Goodbyes, which still receives over a million streams daily. Thug's last album So Much Fun debuted at number one in the United States, a commercial culmination that displayed the artist’s musical contrasts in all their glory. He won his first Grammy for backing vocals and ad-libs on Childish Gambino’s This is America. In 2019, Young Thug became his own genre. His instantly recognisable alto has been slithering and crawling its way up the charts for almost a decade, but the last 24 months have seen Thug rise to become the sun king at the centre of rap’s solar system. The Atlanta rapper, born Jeffery Lamar Williams, has been a growing force in hip-hop for the better part of a decade.
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If you haven't heard of Young Thug, the chances are you've heard someone who sounds like Young Thug.