He’ll interrupt his own lethargic mumble with an electric yelp. He’ll leave a string of rapid-fire syllables and then let his voice dissolve into a blues-moan. He doesn’t just throw lyrics over beats he dances with them.
Thug does the things he does with style, with an ineffable sense of how to leave an impression. But this isn’t a symptom of lyrical laziness, as plenty of critics will assert. And he intentionally lets his voice devolve into mutters and gargles, daring you to catch every word. Thug’s subject matter is money and drugs and sex and killing you and clothes and drugs again - nothing revolutionary. Both are, at least at times, completely true. People will say that Thug doesn’t rap about anything, or that you can’t even understand what he’s saying. Thug is a controversial figure in rap for reasons that go far beyond his amazingly peacocky sartorial decisions. Thug has made the full-on rap-star leap here, and he’s done it without losing one iota of the weirdness that made him interesting in the first place. But whatever purpose it’s supposed to serve in Thug’s greater career arc, Barter 6 works as a beautiful descent into a uniquely psychedelic headspace. Maybe that’s a cop-out, a way of preventing himself from entirely standing behind this thing that he just made. And like Drake, Thug is taking that weird side route of claiming that this up-for-purchase-on-iTunes album is really a mixtape, that the actual album is coming later. It’s Thug’s first proper commercially available album, but like If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, the new one from Thug’s sort-of I-guess labelmate Drake, it’s content to dial in on a specific mental state, staying there and letting its sound breathe. The brand-new Barter 6 is a step further: It’s a mood piece, a confident low-key churn that luxuriates in vibe rather than songcraft. When he teamed up with Rich Homie Quan for “Lifestyle” and the great Rich Gang: Tha Tour Part 1 mixtape, Thug matured even further, smoothing out that energy and using it to assume larger-than-life rap-star status. Around the time he made “ Danny Glover” and “ Stoner,” Thug figured out how to direct that weirdness, to channel his alien energy into fast and exhilarating tracks.
1017 Thug, the mixtape that made Thug into something other than a local Atlanta sensation, was a clumsy, clanging piece of work, but it had enough ideas flying around in there to suck you in anyway. Over his first few mixtapes, Thug managed to transition from being a Lil Wayne disciple to a figure capable of pushing Wayne’s most way-out tendencies even further into the cosmos. He was fascinatingly, absorbingly weird, but he hadn’t learned what to do with that weirdness. There was a time, not that long ago, when “weird” was all Young Thug really was.