As an artist, Young Thug thrives in between spaces. His chic, fresh-off-the-runway looks flirt with androgyny. Entire sequences of his raps unspool as nonsequiturs forcing listeners to extract meaning from bars of source code. Even the assorted ad-libs in his songs maximize the slightest pocket of air, exploding and retracting back through crevices in his unpredictable flows. He is constantly balancing opposing forces: masculine and feminine, light and dark, playful and humorless, pirouetting on a razor’s edge at all times. Modeling alongside Frank Ocean for Calvin Klein in July, he was as plainspoken about fluidity as he’s ever been. “In my world, of course, it don’t matter: You could be a gangster with a dress or you could be a gangster with baggy pants,” he said in his campaign video. “I feel like there’s no such thing as gender.” It’s this freedom, this refusal to define or label himself, and this progressive spirit that makes everything he does so daring and so mystifying. When industry mogul Lyor Cohen argued with Thug about being more accessible to listeners and more purposeful in thought and action on CNBC’s “Follow the Leader,” his response was simple: “I don’t want everybody just to know, like, ‘Oh, we know.’” The remove is everything to him. When he says or does something, he’s usually daring you to figure out why.
Existing on incomprehensible terms has made Thug recherché to the casual rap fan, which is why his debut album turned retail mixtape, Barter 6, remains his greatest pivot of all. It’s cohesive, understated, and about as accessible as Thug gets, an ingenious turn from oddball rap archetype to intuitive master craftsman. Every release after it lives in its shadow: aimless hard drive dumps attempting to combat a massive data breach that leaked hundreds of Thug songs online last May.
In the months since he eulogized his Slime Season trilogy (“All good things must come to an end, this is the birth of something new”), Thug teased snippets of new songs with captions that just read “JEFFERY.” Not long after, Cohen announced an official name change: No, My Name is Jeffery. A trailer for the mixtape found Thug in an interrogation room explaining to cops who he was. He wasn’t a young thug anymore. “I feel like I had a long-term relationship with Young Thug, and I’m kind of picky, so I felt like I didn’t want to be in front of a Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey,” he explained at the Jeffery listening party. “I didn’t want my kids to grow up and call me Thug because in real-life terms Thug is thug.” It’s impossible not to interpret that as some sort of response to the current racial climate, where the word “thug” is used as a racist dog whistle; it’s his most obvious statement in ages. Jeffery is the first Young Thug release that considers identity. But the rapper is rarely ever literal in verse; he always opts to show, not tell.