![]() ![]() 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. ![]() 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. On "Constantly Hating", he frames his voice in near-silence, singing in smooth, rounded four-bar phrases that feel directly informed by dancehall toasting. ![]() 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. His lyrics were more legible, and that twist in focus yielded a real-life pop hit with "Lifestyle". 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. 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. 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. Young Thug has danced along this perilous wave for an impossibly long time. 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.īig 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. 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. 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. The possibilities of his art still multiply whenever he opens his mouth. Young Thug has been an object of intrigue in the hip-hop community for about four straight years, and he isn't predictable yet. 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. Unpredictability over the long-term is almost impossible the numbers relentlessly revert to mean. 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. ![]()
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