Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.
Last October, Young Thug's criminal racketeering trial concluded with the rapper striking a plea deal that got him released from prison. It brought a close to a contentious, high-profile case that could have seen him spend the rest of his life behind bars. Since then, Thug has been observing his probation terms while working on his hotly anticipated next album. A happy ending to a modern rap tragedy, right? Well, it certainly doesn't seem to feel that way for Thug, who is ... working through some complicated feelings.
According to Thug himself, the main feeling he's left with after the whole ordeal is one of betrayal. A number of his former YSL artists positioned themselves against him during the criminal proceedings, most prominently Gunna, Thug's closest friend and the diamond of the label, who was the first to strike an Alford plea deal for himself, which made it so he did no have to testify against Thug directly but he did have to assert that YSL was indeed a criminal enterprise at heart.
For obvious reasons, this was a big deal in the street-rap community and the very streets they profess to represent. Gunna was quickly labeled a snitch and was openly ostracized by Thug collaborators like Lil Durk and Lil Baby. But in spite of the backlash against him for his violation of street code, being branded a snitch did not actually hurt Gunna's career. He's released three albums since his plea, all of which have sold well, and even netted his biggest solo hit single with "FukUMean."
There are probably a number of reasons for this. Despite the YSL affiliation, Gunna has never been a "street" rapper really. He raps, mostly very well, about the high life, and he's never positioned himself as a tough guy who'd committed crimes and acts of violence to attain this lifestyle. He is also quite popular with an increasingly mainstream audience, working with Drake, Camila Cabello, Diplo, and Normani. He's also made major inroads over the years in the Afrobeats scene, which is one of the biggest genres in the world. It's not a shock that he has crossed over enough to insulate his career from the effects of his "snitch" designation. But even beyond that—and though this is speculation on my part, I have been feeling this way for some time—people just seem really burnt out on street rap and, more specifically, street politics.
I place this burnout mainly on the hip-hop-influenced podcast and YouTube media, which is crawling with superficial programs catered to street politics—the VladTVs, the Art of Dialogues, the No Jumper industrial complex. Sometimes this content can have real value, such as rappers-turned-podcasters Gillie and Wallo and their show "Million Dollaz Worth of Game," which did a famous episode featuring Young Thug pre–RICO charges. There, Wallo—who in the past had served a 20-year prison sentence—implored Thug to be careful about the way he's choosing to move despite being a globally successful artist, in a certain sense predicting Thug's criminal case. A similar thing happened with Wallo and Lil Durk and his crew, before Durk was arrested on his own RICO charges.
The good moments in this media ecosystem are ones like this, where former street figures try to pass down wisdom to the younger generation to keep them from making the mistakes of the past. But the majority of the content in this lane is mostly interested in glamorizing the lifestyle of crime and violence, as well as re-litigating the last 30 years of gang activity in America. It's part Vice-style exploitation of gang life, part high school reunion where everyone is arguing about old beefs between the popular kids. Men (it's usually men) going down memory lane about all the dope they sold, people they killed, women they slept with, and prison years they served, while chastising the younger generation for not properly living by the old rules without even a trace of irony. I remember those BMF smack DVDs and loved Big Meech just as much as the next gangster lifestyle–obsessed kid, but the story always ends the same way. Today, Meech is just another old guy who spent too much of his life in prison, living in Atlanta trying to stay relevant with big veneers put in his mouth.
And maybe the biggest part of this exercise is the re-litigation of old snitching accusations. Sometimes two old gangsters will get on the pod mic together and argue over which of them snitched, and if you think this is relegated to just old gang members, trust and believe former mobsters and cartel guys take part in this performance as well.
None of it amounts to much, and it all comes across as gossipy and depressing, particularly when it's your favorite rappers and moguls taking part. Even worse, it seems to have completely warped people's perceptions of what something like snitching even means. It was always a term gangsters applied to the people in their world, not for civilian usage. But now you can randomly turn on an episode of the Jeff Teague podcast and hear Pablo Torre get called a snitch for reporting on Steve Ballmer's alleged scheme to bypass the salary cap. But even beyond the exploitative grist for the content mill, I think people are tired of watching their favorite artists end up dead or in jail behind alleged "street business" that should've been left behind when they became more successful. I don't know if there are more rappers nowadays dying or getting locked up than before, but I do know we are seeing it at an unhealthy clip online, and if it doesn't bother you, it's only because you've become too desensitized to it.
All of that gets us back to Young Thug, who spent three years in a jail cell fighting the trial of his life. Now that it's over, people are happy to see him free, and I for one would like to see him move on. But that's not quite what has happened. For one thing, Thug is still very mad at Gunna, and is especially mad that Gunna's career is still doing well despite his alleged crimes against "the code." And Thug doesn't want to let it go, seemingly looking for some kid of cosmic justice that refuses to come. Instead, what came were his prison calls.
It began with the leak of interrogation room audio where Thug made his own statement to the police, in which he implicated others in order—he says—to help his co-conspirator avoid prison time. He has been very adamant about how this differs from what Gunna did, but it doesn't seem like it is convincing to anyone. Since then, with a consistency and fanfare that many rapper's wish they could pull of for their own album promo, new recorded jail calls from Thug keep getting leaked and going viral.
Some of them have been more pertinent than others, but all of them offer a glimpse into the mind of Young Thug at his most vulnerable. The image they provide is of a man who can be bitter, petty, and just kind of a huge gossip. Under that surface, though, they depict a man deeply traumatized by what is happening to him. Sometimes he's mean for no reason, like when a call featured him denigrating rapper GloRilla's looks (he has since apologized publically). Sometimes he's a stubborn narcissist, like when he complains to 21 Savage about Gunna "pretending" they're still cool online, or when he chastises Kendrick Lamar for not doing a record with him and builds that resentment into a theory about how Lamar's stinginess is the reason why Drake gets more love from the streets than Lamar does. Sometimes he's just funny, like when he's on the phone with his manager and reads Drake the riot act for trying to get a record off of Metro Boomin and himself while the former is dealing with the death of his mother and the latter is facing a lengthy prison sentence.
They're not exactly the Mel Gibson tapes or anything, just a lot of industry gossip from the frantic mind of a successful artist facing a lifetime of imprisonment. That's the part I find compelling about the calls. It might be hard to remember now, but when Young Thug first emerged, he was like a trap music wunderkind. A Lil Wayne acolyte who morphed from an imitating student into a complete original within three mixtapes. His screeching voice and cracked melodic warbles were simultaneously abstract, off-putting, and totally hypnotic. He was Frankenstein's monster rapping over booming 808s, and he treated trap music like a canvas for painting on more than a soundscape to rap over. He was like trap's Miles Davis, and like the original Davis, white music critics really loved writing about him for a while.
Then, a thing that tends to happen happened: he got more and more successful and less and less weird. His YSL label blew up, on the backs of stalwarts like Gunna and Lil Keed, and he was right there next to Atlanta greats on the trap Mt. Rushmore. Right as things were really cresting, it all came crashing down with the May 9, 2022 arrests of himself and other YSL figures. The prosecution alleged that beyond a record label, YSL was a street gang caught up in a gang war against rival gang-affiliated rappers. A few days later, Lil Keed died of an illness. Whatever YSL was, be it record label or violent gang, it was for sure over with.
Since the arrests, Thug has repeatedly taken little swipes at Gunna, no matter how many people presumably told him to leave the situation alone or reminded him that Gunna was still his artist and that he benefitted from Gunna's continued success. Thug seems very troubled that fans didn't care enough about his being betrayed by his closest friend. If you care enough about this story, it is pretty evident that Young Thug is the common denominator in all of his current problems. He made YSL into something that, if not a criminal organization, sure seemed to resemble one. He demanded a lot of loyalty and participation in criminal enterprises from his artists and friends in exchange for being part of a successful rap label. He also talked to the police in ways that at least make his anger at Gunna a little more questionable. He seems to deflect any personal responsibility or self-awareness, and in general doesn't seem to be the most pleasant person to be around. In one of those jail calls, he talks in jovial manner about cheating on his girlfriend, Mariah the Scientist—and it's pretty safe to say he has not been the best partner to her at any time.
It is easy to see why people are not quick to side with Thug, but I am a bit ... vexed, let's say, about how little sympathy or empathy he is garnering. The backlash Thug has faced from the public, and the lurid glee many have taken in sifting through private conversations, dwarfs anything Gunna or anyone else involved has received. It really feels as though people just want him to shut up and make music again, and are ready to punish him for him not doing it.
This would not be a new concept whenever a big rapper gets out of jail. There's a lot of elation that accompanies any rapper's release from lock-up that is quickly replaced by impatience, as people await some wellspring of creative output to make up for lost time. Consumers are consumers at the end of the day, and people want Thug to pick up where he left off. The fact that the music he has shown since his release hasn't been his best fits a separate trope: the rapper who gets out of jail too much of a changed man to get back his original magic. It happened to Bobby Shmurda, it happened to Gucci Mane, it happened to Boosie. It didn't happen to 2Pac, but everyone can agree his music got a lot angrier after prison. Prison is a traumatizing experience, but it still doesn't stop rap fans from treating it like some kind of wellness/writing retreat, where you can get your mind straight and put on some extra muscle and spend the rest of your time filling up notebooks with killer bars.
When Thug did a YouTube interview on "Perspektives with Bank" over the weekend, the toll those three years in jail have exacted on his psyche was evident. When you get past all the excuses and run around, you see a man who doesn't know what to do with himself anymore. A man who really misses all his friends and isn't totally sure how it all ended up where it did. It's obvious much of his anger at Gunna is just because he loved him so much. Whether you want to lay all the blame on him or just most of it, is that not a true human feeling? Does he not deserve a little sympathy and understanding that maybe his comments made in the midst of the most challenging moment in his life do not paint the fullest picture of who he is as a person? If not, what makes us still think we deserve his raps? Maybe all of us are being left to pick up the pieces.
The Best Non-Rap Song Of The Moment
It's emo boy fall and I've been in my feelings extra hard. Listening to a bunch of Brent Faiyaz/Sonder and doing my yearly run through Frank Ocean's Blond(e). I've also been pretty locked in on the latest from Ethel Cain, Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You, particularly this track "Dust Bowl." A perfect complement to an afternoon pining on regrets and hazy memories.
If you would like to contribute something or ask a question for future installments, email me at israel@defector.com.
