![]() Both Gunna and Lil Baby sound like rappers in their prime Thug’s on-again-off-again fiancée Karlae is beginning to sound like a genuine talent Thug’s sister Dolly is downright menacing on “Reckless” and Thug’s latest sibling to take up music, his brother, Unfoonk, sounds poised to become a gravel-throated crooner in the mold of Ty Dolla $ign. But by and large, Thug hangs back and lets his signees and guests shine. There are a few noteworthy moments, like the way he enunciates the word “slatty,” as if his mouth is full of crushed ice, or how his verse on “My City Remix” (a remix of YTB Trench’s “My City”), swerves from “Federales looking but they can't find the body” to “Tryna see my kids every day because it's healthy” in the space of just a few bars. Even the thrills feel a bit second-hand: we’ve heard better “mac and cheese” puns from Thug before and it was more convincing the last time he told us he felt something in his chromosome. So many of Thug’s verses and hooks here feel that way-competent and tuneful, if not quite memorable. In one of his first high-profile appearances since his release from a New York state prison, Rowdy Rebel stomps all over the horn-filled fanfare of "Came and Saw," which feels like a sequel to Thug and Gunna’s hit “Hot.” It's telling that "Superstar" is one of the weirdest songs on here thanks to an appearance from Thug’s direct antecedent, Future: the trap legend reaches for notes out of his range and coos in a singsong cadence over what sounds like kazoos while Thug just coasts comfortably. Lil Uzi Vert draws a line in the sand between himself and his elusive host by infusing "Proud of You" with a gracious, wide-eyed sincerity (he also coins the term “Smith stoneian”). "Solid" feels by turns like a Drake song, a Gunna song and a Thug song, each rapper fully commanding the shifting, distant beat. Still, a party’s a party, and much like with the previous installment, the aspiration here is clearly to provide an hour of breezy songs designed to go off during the summer. ![]() He feels a bit like Jay Gatsby here: the guests are glamorous and the trappings of the party are opulent, but the host is content to recede into the background. Slime Language 2 expands on that approach: here Thug comfortably rubs shoulders with superstars, peers, influences, and descendants, serving as the glue that holds these songs together while rarely commanding the spotlight. What was new was the way that Thug ceded so many of that album’s big moments to his mentees Gunna and Lil Baby, both of whom have arguably become even better-known than Thug among younger listeners. So Much Fun was also the first time we’d seen Thug standing still it’s hard to point to something on the album that he hadn’t done before. It stands as his most focused and consistent release since the mid-career masterpiece Barter 6. In hindsight, 2019’s So Much Fun looks like a turning point in Thug’s career. His innovations in songwriting and vocal delivery were pushing rap forward, but it was difficult to imagine Young Thug ever becoming an elder statesman-if anything, he seemed like a shooting star that we were lucky to have witnessed at all. A steady stream of mixtapes showed an artist who was evolving at a pace that was hard to comprehend and who didn’t always care for details like editing and sequencing. And yet, the announcement of his debut album failed to stick, much like his short-lived name changes. Thug had been recording at a furious pace, as leak dumps of hundreds of tracks revealed. “You just record so many songs and leave them like little orphans out there,” Cohen snapped, during a meeting that was filmed for the CNBC show “Follow the Leader”. In 2016, Young Thug received a dressing-down on national television, at the hands of his then-mentor and label boss, Lyor Cohen. ![]()
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