Category: DJPBF

YOUNG THUG ENACTS a Charlie Parker theory of trap. Virtuosity, drugginess, genius, vulnerability, an impish childishness almost as a compensation for the overabundance of talent, the superfluidity of imagination. A Cocteau from East Atlanta, he teases the beat, skipping off it like a yo-yo, yodeling, crooning, blurting, squawking, purring, working his game on you, finessing, playing ad libs like Curtis Mayfield worked strings, or scatting and growling low like Louis Armstrong if he were sweating it out in a freestyle battle with James Brown, bouncing back and forth between personalities. His polymorphously perverse sexuality is so insistently graphic and deadpan that it has virtually zero erotic charge, au courant pimp talk channeled through a kind of private board game of his own imagination, a Candyland fantasia slimed in promethazine. By contrast, his persona oozes sex. In leather jackets, ultratight jeans and Janet Jackson piercing arrangements, he’s a Mick Jagger–ish rake on the make who is also shy and easily wounded, suddenly open for a hug. A favorite and telling picture posted to Instagram account thuggerthugger1 (5.2 million followers) captures him with his arm around Sir Elton John, posing like a polite politician in photo-op mode (Obama-alt) next to Sir Elton, who is dressed in a gold-trim Adidas tracksuit and a black thugger cap.

“Notes on Trap,” Jesse McCarthy

i’m plannin on standin behind a personal canon, and in fact it’s that act that maps a world beyond appearance, your adherence to dogma it’s not comin along ya wanted a name but you keep it too tame to ever deserve to be heard in this noise and glut, girl you know I’m a slut so show me that ass and grab the cash in the safe, now I’m blastin away all day with an AK, Viet Cong hit the bong movin on, song to song, all night long I be workin & lurkin & twerkin til my shit got you perkin up even if you’re sippin from a dirty cup.