“I relaxed, worked on my label, got everything how I needed it,” he says, scratching the two diamond studs embedded in his bottom lip. The song’s success is vindication for Thug after spending much of the last 12 months on other endeavors, including his fashion line SPIDER and music imprint YSL Records. Cole and Travis Scott is a prime slice of palatial aspiration rap, and is already Thug’s highest-charting single of his career. You only should play this music when you’re having a good time.” His new song “The London” with J. He flashes a smile that could clean a comet: “I really didn’t think too much about it,” he says. A recent string of underrated releases (2017’s Beautiful Thugger Girls, 2018’s Slime Language, and “High,” a song featuring a rapturous sample of Elton John’s “Rocket Man”) meant Thug was left treading water for the first time in his ascendant career.Īround February 2019, Thug started assembling ideas for his album So Much Fun. He shared a 2019 Song of the Year Grammy for his work on Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” yet there’s an overwhelming sense that his moment still has yet to arrive. He reshaped hip-hop’s sound and image again and again before releasing a “debut album.” He has feuded with his biggest influence (Lil Wayne) and collaborated with rappers he has inspired while retaining his distinction (Travis Scott, Playboi Carti, Juice WRLD, and many, many more). Young Thug’s near-decade-long career in rap music has been unprecedented. “Because of what they see, not what they know.”įor about an hour, Young Thug tells me what he knows. “ misunderstand my mind and my heart,” he says, steely yet receptive to my questions. Thug is in superstar mode for most of the time - a reluctant cog in the machine he’s built for himself - but when we eventually talk, he peeks from behind the extravagant veneer. He’s in the country for less than 24 hours, and I’m with him for six. Thug’s performance comes at the end of a run of European festival dates. People begin to break off into their own conversations, some of us sit on the black leather couches, others on the fake grass carpet. Strick, an artist and incorrigible flirt signed to Thug’s record label YSL Records, resigns himself to the minifridge. The party may have left with a group of girls who tagged along and got rejected at the gate by Tomorrowland security no wristbands. For now, the mood backstage among Thug’s team is sedate. His birth name is Jeffery Lamar Williams, and he keeps changing the world.ĮDM purists don’t care about hip-hop pedigree, though, and as I hover in Thug’s green room, I’m uncertain how his crowd will react.
But they’re also true: Thug is a 28-year-old hitmaker, visionary, fashionista, one of the most polarizing artists of the 21st century, androgynous icon, and leader.
When an Uber driver in Belgium asks me who I am interviewing, the language barrier leads me to use a lot of superlatives. Thug’s set at Tomorrowland is unexpected but not undeserved. The festival’s theme is “The Book of Wisdom,” and Young Thug’s chapter stands out in its pages. These fans will get baptized in a life-affirming cocktail of neon lights, mud, and (mostly) electronic music, played in front of towering backdrops designed like steampunk palaces. Hundreds of thousands of people will gather over two weekends in sprawling recreation grounds in the sleepy town of Boom, just outside of Brussels. Tomorrowland resembles a Harry Potter theme park designed by street performers - the fire-eating, Cirque du Soleil kind. Thug will perform in about an hour’s time: his Afroman, delivered like a cheeky seventh grader showing off for mom, lightens the room. Their basslines bleed ominously through the walls of our quarters, along with an occasional roar of a crowd. “ I was gonna pay my child support, but then I got high…” We’re backstage with Thug’s dozen-plus entourage at the Belgian music festival Tomorrowland, and the Atlanta rapper’s voice dances off the cramped walls even without Auto-Tune.įar outside, EDM DJs play across several different stages on a crisp Saturday evening. Young Thug strides past me and, almost to himself, starts singing a line from “Because I Got High,” the novelty weed hit by Afroman.