Young Thug Doesn’t Care About Your Labels By: Bogart Lipe

Young Thug Doesn’t Care About Your Labels

By: Bogart Lipe

Young Thug is unlike any prior artist who has called the hip-hop genre his home. Regardless of how you may feel about some of his beliefs, fashion, and how these blend with his insistence on being referred to as “Thug”, the 26 year old Atlanta native is to be reckoned with. His music is not as much unique as it is a euphoric whirlwind, frequently tip toeing lines between rap and pop, sometimes shattering the lines between music and flirting with rock and even country. As we enter 2018, Young Thug still owns one of the most interesting projects of the past year, Beautiful Thugger Girls, released in June, 2017.

BTG shows us many sides of Young Thug and his emotions. We hear him speak about family and friends and how these cross with his world of sex, drugs, and violence in the project’s intro, “Family Don’t Matter”. Thug’s point of view on love dominates other songs such as “Do U Love Me” and “Me Or Us”. And of course, trap music collaborations with fellow Atlanta-bred stars Future (on “Relationship”) and Quavo (featured on the track “On Fire”) stand out. Capped off with “Take Care”, a song that feels and sounds like a celebration. It’s a song that further encapsulates how Thugger is able to take any beat and completely make it his own, inserting his enchanting wails and ability to twist words and turn them into notes themselves.

Young Thug is admittedly not for everyone. He rarely beats around the bush, and doesn’t leave much up to imagination when referring to women, drugs, and partying. Songs like “Feel It” will surely make some listeners squirm. However, this is how Young Thug expresses himself. He does so with an in-your-face style and sometimes appears to try to see just how far and descriptive he can get on a track. His style of rapping, if you are willing to call it such, is meteoric. We have never seen or heard anyone like Thugger, and he is growing into his full abilities.

Beautiful Thugger Girls is a far cry from “Lifestyle”, a hit 2014 song that turned into a meme on social media and helped originate the jeering of Young Thug revolving around the difficulty to understand what he was trying to communicate and convey. On BTG, there is no room for this mocking. With other relatively recent features on the hits “Pick Up the Phone” and “Patek Water”, Young Thug has proven his distinctive ability to mainstream listeners. Although the October 2017 “SUPER SLIMEY” collaboration with Future left much to be desired, an argument can be had which pins most of the blame on Future more so than Young Thug.

Not all hip hop sounds the same, and Thugger can’t compare to pure rappers like the current King of Rap, Kendrick Lamar. However, Thug is proving that a different style of music can exist in the genre, where not only lyrics matter, but ability to mesh sounds and words with music do too. It comes down to personal preference, since the patented squealing and rapid pace of verbiage by Thug can prove to be too much for some listeners. But as a previous Young Thug doubter, BTG has shown another level of Young Thug and one that needs to be listened to and paid attention to. As we enter 2018, here’s to hoping that we get to experience more incredible music like we did in 2017.