A couplet from “Mine” – probably the most hypnotic song to surface in the big leak – compresses his lethal aura, his sexual ambition and a bling-dusted smile into one slippery, surreal image: “Wet diamonds in my mouth /If I kiss her, she drown.”
X.
He does earth, wind and fire, too. “I pull up and arson all over your garden” he raps on a “Slime Season” track called “Freaky,” offering his most evocative threat while transforming a noun into a verb.
This mischievous defiance courses through all of his music. He reshapes the vowels of certain words in order to make them rhyme. He relies heavily on oddly broken similes, replacing the word “like” with the word “no.” He brags about the sex he won’t have. He promises “no cussin,’ ” then explodes into streaks of profanity. When he raps about specific drugs, he might torque his voice to sound like he’s impervious to the effects of those very drugs. It’s all a strange, playful display of power: Young Thug will not follow the rules of logic, English, seduction or pharmacology.
Ultimately, he’s building metaphorical riddles out of encrypted slang – constructions that can disintegrate into non-linear nonsense, or twist themselves into pop songs, or both. The music’s cumulative thrill comes from being repeatedly plunged into a space between understanding and not understanding at all.
XI.
If there’s really no time like the present, why are so many listeners perpetually obsessed with futurity? We always seem to have our ears pointed toward something that hasn’t arrived yet, or something that may never show up, or something that we won’t understand until tomorrow anyway. It’s a problem. Committed listening isn’t a speculative exercise. We’re not placing any bets.
Which is why we should do everything we can to resist thinking of Young Thug as a futurist. Yes, he’s fantastically unique, but the music he’s making isn’t happening tomorrow. It’s happening right now. And it’s every bit as rich and complicated and gnarly and dazzling as right now, too.
We have no choice but to live in the present, but we still get to choose whether or not we’d like to listen to what it really sounds like.
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