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The new work immediately separates itself from Jeffery’s last year of releases - three volumes of Slime Season, plus I’m Up! - to the point that it feels like the rightful follow-up to Barter 6, a capital-A Album in essence if not in name. It’s hard to give an uninitiated listener a single point of entry into what makes Thug so special: Barter 6 highlights his songwriting ability but downplays the surrealism the Slime Season tapes have the range but not the unified vision 2013’s 1017 Thug has the hits, but his rapping has gotten far more avant-garde in the years since.įinally: Jeffery feels like the closest thing to harmony between the fans, the label, and, most of all, the artist who’s at long last ready to make a serious play for mainstream stardom, albeit on his own terms. But all the same, it’s lent Thug’s discography a sense of anti-gravity: an endless grab-bag of moods and styles, studded with transient moments of unparalleled brilliance (or what Lyor Cohen referred to as “ little orphans,” because nothing’s sadder than a hit song that doesn’t make everyone a shit-ton of money, right?). Half the fun of being a Young Thug fan is how personalized the process of cobbling together a “best of” playlist can feel, waiting for that one song or line or adlib that changes everything. More than any other rapper currently working, the idea of any definitive ranking of Thug’s oeuvre feels impossible, or, at the very least, beside the point. As of last year’s Barter 6, every Young Thug project has been indecisively presented as a “commercial mixtape,” a hedging of bets by his label, 300, which has given his sizeable recent catalog a strange sense of interchangeability. Bet you never heard of a player with no game.īut Jeffery, like ATLiens 20 years prior, has that unqualifiable, absolute feeling of arrival - a flag planted firmly in the inhospitable grounds of the mainstream. Or maybe the point is that there isn’t one. “Every time I rhyme for y’all, I’m looking to prove a point,” Big Boi rapped on “Two Dope Boyz.” If Jeffery contains a mission statement, it’s the exact opposite. ATLiens is a tight, tense coil, quivering on the edge of springing in an unpredictable direction Jeffery is all momentum, an exhibitionist physics demonstration about action and reaction. If the 1996 masterpiece turned Atlanta into a paranoid, depressive sci-fi comic, Jeffery’s universe is a superflat manga, dimensionless and casually surreal. Outkast’s second album was a vengeful mission statement, an airing of grievances to a narrow-minded industry - one last survey of a ravaged Earth before departing to a more beautiful plane of existence. Young Thug, whom they decline to call Jeffery, doesn’t even rap about anything! Having valiantly defended the dream of ’96 from infidel invaders, the Hip-Hop Defense League returned to arguing about Lil Yachty’s knowledge of the canon.īefore we get carried away: Jeffery does not sound like ATLiens, nor does Jeffery rap like André 3000 or Big Boi. Three Stacks would have never worn a dress, they clamored ( incorrectly), but besides, OutKast made classics. Reminds me of a certain ATLien I know.” If you scroll through the replies, you will find dozens of people telling her - André 3000’s lifelong creative soulmate and the mother of his child, among many more significant titles - why she is wrong. The next day, Erykah Badu shared the image on Twitter, adding: “Amazing Thugger. It is the image of a person who inhabits himself ecstatically. His pose speaks for itself, with the kind of unstudied ease that can feel menacing to those who don’t possess it themselves - the “face me and meet your maker” beckon is implied - but when he reveals his face on the back cover, he is beaming. Suspended in nothingness, face hidden but for a few stray dreads beneath a Pygmalian parasol, serving Revolutionary Girl Utena realness in a genderless Alessandro Trincone fabric sculpture. Then Jeffery (who explained at the project’s listening party that he’d moved on from his old moniker because “I don’t want my kids to grow up calling me ‘Thug’”) unveiled the album art. Like a lot of us, I’d had André 3000 on the brain last week thanks to that verse on Frank Ocean’s “Solo (Reprise)” that we all decided was a Drake diss, though it turned out to be two years old. The current best rapper in Atlanta, and probably the universe, had just turned five when André Benjamin and Antwan Patton unleashed their official challenge to the rest of the rap game, the ones who booed when the duo won Best New Rap Group at the ’95 Source Awards. Jeffery - the latest not-quite-album, not-quite-mixtape from the artist formerly known as Young Thug - missed the 20-year anniversary of Outkast’s ATLiens by a day.