Would Punk follow the re-influx of pop-punk aesthetics in mainstream music? Would Thug, an avid student of Lil Wayne (whose Barter 6 album title was a provocation to Wayne and his Carter album series), follow his elder into the morass of the awful 2010 butt-rock misfire Rebirth? This year, Thug has been teasing Punk, the sophomore album previewed at an NPR Tiny Desk Concert whose crunchy guitars and cameo from Blink-182 alumnus Travis Barker appeared to convey a renewed interest in the guitar. Last spring’s Slime & B, in collaboration with Chris Brown, saw Thug gracing the slickest production he touched since his chart-topping Camila Cabello collaboration “Havana.” This spring’s Slime Language 2 gave the members of the rapper’s Young Stoner Life collective ample room to shine, ceding some of the spotlight to Dolly White, HiDoraah, and Unfoonk, Thug’s real-life siblings. A new Thug release could signal a quick detour into a new genre or introduce new bit players. Cole, thinkers who don’t much care for the spotlight if their long absences are to be believed. He’s not like Drake or Future, whose consistencies warrant a guess at the sound of a new release if not the subject matter, or Kendrick Lamar and J. Young Thug is attempting a different kind of reign than the hip-hop A-listers he counts among his friends and collaborators now. By the time he dropped a debut studio album - 2019’s So Much Fun, discounting many retail mixtapes, EPs, and compilations - he’d amassed the necessary chops, connections, and name recognition to score his first No.
A certain subset of hip-hop head pawned this all off as “ mumble rap,” a catchall term demeaning (mostly Southern) rappers for the clarity of their diction, but Thug persisted across releases like 2013’s 1017 Thug, 2015’s Barter 6, and 2016’s Jeffery, evolving his sound and inching a little closer to the top of the Billboard 200 album chart with each subsequent drop. Cuts like I Came From Nothing 3’s “I Know Ya” sounded like mutant descendants of the booming, triumphant beats of 2000s Jeezy tapes and the gymnastic lyrical flights of the music Lil Wayne was releasing at the same time.
Thug’s I Came From Nothing mixtapes filtered sharp melodic sensibilities and a natural gift for rhyming through a playful, warbling tone that coolly undercut his formidable talents with an air of levity. Thirty-year-old sometime Atlanta rap iconoclast Young Thug began releasing mixtapes around the same time Tyler and Keef were experiencing their early hits and controversies. Consider Tyler, the Creator, who saw criticism for the abrasive lyrics and corrosive sonics of releases like 2009’s Bastard and 2011’s Goblin, then spent the better part of a decade fine-tuning his music as streams and accolades racked up take Chief Keef, the Chicago rapper whose 2012 breakthrough was met with intense debates about morality in street rap closer in tone to the cultural mores of the late ’80s than the early ’10s. Stir the pot too much and the dish gets a little tougher to sell. Hip-hop appreciates change … up to a point.
0 kommentar(er)
