4. Only four rappers who had not already had a platinum-selling album before 2006 have had one go platinum since then: Drake, Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar, and Macklemore.
5. I automatically like anybody who makes me feel taller.
6. It’s not. I checked.
7. Kendrick exists as a duality. He is equally good at framing rap as a fun thing and an artistic thing, and that’s a trick only the very best rappers on the planet are capable of doing. (The easiest comparison to make is to Andre 3000.)
8. Six different people have been James Bond in a Bond movie. Connery was the best. Daniel Craig was second. Pierce Brosnan was last. Get him and his invisible car all the way TF outta here.
9. How real do you have to be to get invited to be on a song and then go on that song and dump all over the other two dudes on the song with you? Kendrick was on some true Charles Darwin shit.
10. Mac Miller, Pittsburgh’s endlessly likable goofball rapper, had the best response of all to Kendrick, tweeting out, “If I can’t do no more nouns or verbs ima start comin with the wildest adjective bars that anyone has ever heard.”
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
It’s about two sirs who are excited about not being poor anymore, which is for sure a thing to celebrate.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
Young Thug’s bizarreness had already been proved a creative commodity. “Lifestyle” showed it could be a commercial one, too, and that legitimized it, which offered it up for appropriation for rappers to come.
I. “Lifestyle” is a song by Rich Gang, which maybe you figured out because the title of this chapter says exactly that.
II. Rich Gang is a supergroup, and that’s just a more political way to say there are more members than in a usual group and things are often disorganized. One is a rapper named Young Thug and another is a rapper named Rich Homie Quan, which maybe you also figured out because the art in this chapter is of their faces, though that seems less likely because Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan are not famous in the way a sizable portion of the rappers in this book are famous, which is to say very famous, or recognizably famous.
III. While Rich Homie Quan is talented and fun and very likely a more technically proficient rapper, Young Thug is uniquely mesmerizing, and it feels easy to say that, between the two of them, he already has been, and will remain, more important to rap. Of course, all of that is to say: Most of this chapter is about Young Thug. Thank you.
♦
Let us not pretend that you or I really know anything about Young Thug, and maybe that’s the entire point of Young Thug, and if it’s not then it’s definitely (at least a very small) part of the reason he’s interesting.
Through the last quarter of 2013, Young Thug existed mostly as a product unknown to everyone who either wasn’t from Atlanta, which is where he’s from, or who wasn’t actively involved in the upkeep of a website devoted to rap music. Then, right at the beginning of 2014, separate from each other by about two weeks, a clip of Drake enthusiastically rapping along to a Young Thug song1 in a nightclub in Miami and a clip of Kanye West doing the same thing at a nightclub in Paris began pinging around the Internet, and it’s just that easy. There’s this tool on Google that allows you to identify trends based on the number of times something is searched on the Internet. It displays the results as a line graph. Until October 2013, which marked the official release of “Stoner,” Young Thug’s first song to wiggle its way into prominence, the quantified search return for “Young Thug” was basically zero, and it should be made clear that Young Thug had been releasing mixtapes since 2011. From October 2013 to January 2014, there was a rise, and then, when Drake and Kanye high-fived him, there was a sharp, definite incline, and it’s semiweird to be able to see the recalibration of rap aggregated into a line graph, but that’s exactly what it is, and I guess it all makes sense because everything about Young Thug has always been weird, or at least presented that way.
♦
These are the reasons Young Thug is important: Because of the way he dresses, because of the way he talks, and because of the way he raps. None of them are intentional challenges to what came before him, but they all have become that. Let’s go in reverse order of their gravity:
3. THE WAY HE TALKS, SPECIFICALLY THE WAY HE TALKS TO MEN
He calls them “lover” and “hubby” and “bae.” He’s explained several times that he’s not gay, simply that he is not uncomfortable making other people uncomfortable, and that sounds right. I asked Tom Breihan about Young Thug once. Breihan is a music writer who I know to be eager and intelligent and concise. His response included the sentiment that Thug was inadvertently challenging homophobia in rap just by existing. That sounds right, too. More on that:
2. THE WAY HE DRESSES, BECAUSE HIS CLOTHES ARE OFTEN VERY TIGHT AND OCCASIONALLY A DRESS
(1) The tight clothes: Young Thug did not pioneer wearing tight clothes, but he certainly embraced them as enthusiastically as any rapper had (or has). His shirts grab his arms firmly and his pants grab his legs just as firmly. When he stands straight up, he looks like a flamingo in black Levi’s. He wears a flimsy white button-down shirt in the “Lifestyle” video and his arms look like straws in unopened paper sleeves. It should be ridiculous, but it’s not, like when Jared Leto wore that fanny pack, or when Shia LaBeouf wears anything. (2) The dress: Young Thug posted a picture of himself wearing a dress at a photo shoot on Instagram. During an interview with Complex, the interviewer tried to give him an out (“Now, was that a shirt or was that . . . a dress?”). Young Thug smiled and explained that it was a dress for a “seven- or eight-year-old” girl, because Young Thug doesn’t need an out.2 Young Thug is a beautiful evolution.
1. BECAUSE OF THE WAY HE RAPS, WHICH IS TRANSCENDENT
On “Lifestyle,” the most moving moment is when he wobbles out the line, “I’ve done did a lot of shit just to live this here lifestyle,” because he says it with the exultation of a person who’s gone from a very poor lifestyle to a very rich lifestyle very quickly, because that’s what happened to him. It’s meaningful for another reason, too, and one that is way heavier.
“I’ve done did a lot of shit just to live this here lifestyle” is not an altogether original proclamation, and that’s fine, because Young Thug is not altogether interested in original proclamations. His focus slants in the reverse direction; he’s interested in proclaiming things originally. He yelps and mumbles and takes words and strips them of all their meaning until they’re just sounds and then splashes them on the floor. Imagine if you could hug your own happiness. Imagine if you took both of your feet and stuck them in a bucket full of warm mud and wiggled your toes around, except that mud isn’t mud, it’s your soul. That’s how Young Thug raps. He’s maybe the first post-text rapper, in that he doesn’t even really need words.
The most obvious comparison to make to Young Thug is the loopy, ephemeral, post-drugs-phase Lil Wayne, who turned stupor-rambling into true prose. That’s where Young Thug’s center is. He took that, then advanced it, adding the humdrum brilliance of Gucci Mane; the electricity of Waka Flocka; the spazzy, auto-tuned gargling of Rich Homie Quan; and the rubble of all the rest of the new wave Atlanta rap satellite scenes and mushed them together into a glob of ectoplasm. He’s like a human coagulation. The result became a powerful and new style that also felt warm and familiar.
Lifestyle
“Hundred bands still look like the fuckin’ Titans” (0:48)
“Even though I ain’t gon’ hit it, I’ma still make sure that she gushy” (0:56)
“Hop up in my bed full of forty bitches and yawnin’” (1:09)
“I do this shit for my daughters and all my sons, bitch” (1:15)
“I got a moms, bitch, she got a moms, bitch” (1:20)
“And I’ma die for my nigga, aye” (1:55)
“I ain’t got AIDS but I swear to God I would bleed ‘til I D.I.E.” (2:14)
“Pee on top of these bitches” (2:20)
“God told me they
can never stop me so they ain’t gon’ stop me” (2:23)
“They wanna know how I got M’s and I didn’t finish college” (2:30)
“Money on money, I got commas in every bank” (3:03)
“I’m skatin’ like that nigga Lupe” (3:28)
“Aye, I’m in her mouth just like toothpaste” (3:35)
Comparative, Autobiographical, Get Money, Insightful, Considerate, Boastful, Psychological
Young Thug is the crossing of all the parts of rap that matter that aren’t specifically rap-based—persona, style, rebellion. “Lifestyle” is a celebration of that.
♦
When I started working on this book, I was way too nervous about writing the first few chapters and way too nervous about writing the last few (2014 especially), though for wholly separate reasons.
The first few, I figured, had happened before I was even paying any attention to rap (I was negative two years old in 1979). How was I supposed to put together all of the pieces surrounding the genesis of the most impactful, most influential genre of music of the last thirty-five years? Because to write about why a song is important is superdifferent than just writing about, say, why it’s good, or fun. You have to consider the external variables that were bending and shaping and forcing the music forward, and then consider the gravity of those changes and all of the orbits of everything after a particular song was released. This, it turned out, was not that hard, because a lot of very smart people had already gone about the work of chronicling the history of rap, so basically all I was doing was reading history books and listening to music, trying to maybe make a handful of connections nobody’d considered before.
It was the opposite with the last few chapters. The songs for the recent years had literally just occurred, and so sussing out their impact was going to be trickier, or at least more of a gamble, I thought. It was easy to peek back to 1987 and identify that that’s when Rakim perfected rap as an art, because I could look at the years that came after it and see how it eventually all spiraled back to him, and that’s very helpful. Without that benefit, how was that going to play? I worried, and I worried about it a fair amount until I realized there was no need to. The concern was unfounded, for 2014 especially. Because Young Thug is super-obvious—what he came from, who he became, what he will become, and what will come, eventually, from what he created.
REBUTTAL: “EARLY” RUN THE JEWELS, FEATURING BOOTS
Hip-hop generally celebrates personal power; this devastating tag team is about watching it get crushed. Over churning dystopian synths, Killer Mike draws a scene that might’ve stepped out of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: A cop shakes down an unarmed man “just tryin’ to smoke and chill” in his neighborhood, who begs, “Please don’t lock me up in front of my kids, and in front of my wife,” and adds, with no trace of sarcasm, “I respect the badge and the gun.” No matter: He’s cuffed and carted off like chattel.
El-P’s verse bears witness, with details that suggest an atrocity, while Boots’s pained falsetto hook leaves the title an open question. Too early for what? To wake up to another day of Sisyphean grinding? For a boy to see the subjugation of his father? For a young man to be branded a criminal? To be murdered by a police state?
In the year of Ferguson, Eric Garner, and worldwide #BlackLivesMatter protests, this would have resonated deeply even if it wasn’t featured on what plenty of heads and bean counters considered the year’s best rap LP. And spitting at a nation of millions on Letterman, the pair took it to another level, with a full band plus backing vocalists in Day of the Dead makeup. Up front: a white man—El-P, arms raised in Hands Up Don’t Shoot solidarity—and a black man, Killer Mike, who pulls up his hood after ending his tale on the declaration “My life changed with that sound.” Your life might, too.
—WILL HERMES
1. “Danny Glover.”
2. Other rappers who have worn dresses (or skirts): A$AP Rocky, Puff Daddy, Pusha T (he wore a leather skirt after he started hanging out with Kanye West, and that’s just beautiful), Wiz Khalifa, Mos Def, Andre 3000 (in the “International Players Anthem” video), Kid Cudi (of course), Snoop, CeeLo Green (he wore a wedding dress), and, of course, Kanye West.
Acknowledgments
There are so many people I need to thank. It’s a gross amount, really. I’m going to break it into Professional and Personal sections, even though those two categories blend together quite a bit.
Professional: First, I need to thank my book editor, Samantha Weiner, because without her there is no book, and I don’t mean that to be a stylistic statement, I mean that as a fact. The premise of this book was actually her idea. It just happened to be that she picked me to write it. So thank you for that, Samantha. And thank you for all the phone calls and the emails and the encouragement and really for just dragging my lifeless corpse all the way to the seventy-two-thousand-plus words it ended up being. Sorry I was such a chore sometimes. I hope you like the way it turned out. And I hope we do more books together. And even if we don’t, I hope you are very successful still. You deserve it. You deserve great things. (My secret is that this isn’t true. I’m just being polite. If we don’t do more books together, then I hope all the rest of your authors are human headaches.)
Thank you to Arturo Torres for illustrating this book. You did great work. It’s so crazy to think about how I found your artwork on an obscure flyer online and now here we are with a book together, connected for life.
Thank you to Ice-T for writing the foreword. I still really can’t even believe that it happened. It means a tremendous amount, and I want you to know that I purposely didn’t answer the phone the first time you called me because I wanted to have an Ice-T voicemail. It’s a top five thing of my whole life. Thank you. (And for sure thank you to Jorge Hinojosa for arranging for Ice-T to do the foreword. Thank you, Jorge. Genuinely.)
Thank you to Sebit Min and Sally Knapp from Abrams, and Rob Sternitzky, for designing and editing and copyediting all of my everything and turning it into this beautiful and airtight book. I hope a thousand great things happen to you and then I hope a thousand more great things happen to you after that.
Thank you to the amazing and smart and talented writers and editors who were nice enough to contribute blurbs to this book. That includes Sean Fennessey, Rob Harvilla, Chris Ryan, Jon Caramanica, Jessica Hopper, Chris Weingarten, Rembert Browne, Molly Lambert, Claire Lobenfeld, Randall Roberts, Bomani Jones, Will Hermes, Greg Howard, Lauren Nostro, Tom Breihan, Brandon Soderberg, Devon Maloney, eskay, Wesley Morris, Jeff Rosenthal, Nathaniel Friedman, Chuck Eddy, Paul Cantor, Rob Markman, Meaghan Garvey, Jonah Bromwich, Miles Raymer, Ben West-hoff, Jozen Cummings, Emma Carmichael, Mike Ayers, Dave Bry, Craig Jenkins, Benjamin Meadows-Ingram, Jayson Greene, Amos Barshad, and Ryan Dombal. Just typing out all of your names is legit overwhelming. You’re for real some of the best music writers in the country, and I’m so proud that I get to have my name on something that also has yours. I’m terrified that I forgot to list someone in there. I really hope I didn’t.
A thank-you goes to Reggie Ossé (Combat Jack) for helping vet the list of songs chosen for this book early on, and a thank-you goes to Chris Weingarten for the same thing. And since we’re here, an extra thank-you goes to Chuck Eddy, too, for helping me form the chapters for 1979–1985 and also 1987. Your insight was extremely helpful. That same extra thank-you also goes to Brandon Soderberg, who helped with the chapters for ’81, ’84, ’85, ’87, ’90, ’96, ’02, ’05–08, ’10, and 2011, and who I think has a V8 engine for a brain.
Let me also say more thank-yous to Sean Fennessey and Chris Ryan and include Mark Lisanti in here, too. They’ve been my editors at Grantland since I started working there in July 2014 (and freelancing for about a year before that), and writing for them is a thing that I recommend everyone do, because they are sincerely smart and have a monumental ability to turn even the goofiest idea or halfway thought you present to them into something challenging and interesting.
I
also need to include Dan Fierman and Bill Simmons in this section, too. They have only ever given me good counsel and for real changed my life when they asked me to come work for them. Thank you both for everything. I will never be able to say thank you enough but I will never stop trying. And I will 100 percent fight anyone you tell me to fight, on sight.
Thank you to Zein Nour, Evan Auerbach, and Nick Lucchesi for helping with the research that you two helped with. You guys are neat and I hope when we finally meet in person I don’t hate you and you don’t hate me.
Thank you to anyone else who helped with the book either directly or indirectly, including but not limited to Bill Barnwell, Jason Concepcion, Henry Abbott, UGK, Young Jeezy, Juvenile and the rest of the Hot Boys, Amin Elhassan, Twitter, the 2014 San Antonio Spurs, Jodeci, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, carne guisada, the collected works of Chuck Klosterman, and any person who’s ever been on MSNBC’s Lockup.
Thank you to Chris Gray and Margaret Downing, two people I will always owe very much to.
Personal: Thank you to my three younger sisters: Yasminda, Nastasja, and Marie. I hope you dudes know that I love you very much and that you can always ask me for anything and talk to me about anything. I should probably call you more. I’m definitely going to call you more.
Thank you to my mom and my dad. I am glad that you two let me listen to rap music when I was younger and I’m even more glad that you taught me that the only things I should ever really cherish or care about are my family and good on-the-ball defense in basketball. Sorry if I wrote anything in this book that was embarrassing.
Thank you to my grandma. I think about you a lot and I wish you’d have been able to see this. I’d love to know what you would’ve said.
Thank you to my three sons: Braxton, Caleb, and Parky. I’m so proud watching you nerds grow up. I can’t believe I had any part in making anything as perfect as you all are. I want you to know that I’m always very happy any time you talk to me or even pay any sort of attention to me, and I want you to know that I will explode all of the planets in the galaxy to protect you if I have to. I also want you to know you should never root for the Rockets.
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 28