On an early spring night in April of 2013 I got a little too drunk at a small party after work, sent some pretty stupid texts to a girl I had been chasing for the greater portion of two years, sulked about it, and set off to catch the campus bus back to my apartment. I stopped off for a few slices of my favorite pizza and put my headphones on, eating pepperoni slices cooled by the steady rain. I let my iTunes shuffle, only to be put off by the ten or so cheery, upbeat songs it had played one after the next- I wasn’t much in the mood for Bananarama or The Tom Tom Club, so I stopped, scarfed down the last few bites of pizza and opened Spotify.

Having not listened to anything new in the vein of trap rap in a few weeks, an odd occurrence for me, I decided to take Spotify’s suggestion and turn on Gucci Mane’s Trap God II and let it shuffle through the tracks. The first track it played, “Break Dance” was a display of all the things I’ve come to love about Gucci since I bought Trap House during the summer before my senior year of high school. Seeing a feature by a rapper with as unimaginative a moniker as Young Thug, I expected to simply skip over the unknown’s verse and move onto the next offering. Being the fair man I am, I decided to let the track play on.

I didn’t skip. In fact, I played the song about seven more times at the bus stop that night, and a half dozen times the next day. This Young Thug kid had caught my attention. The ATL native with the slightly nasally voice who rapped with the urgency of an annoying, excited little brother had stolen the show despite what could be called a shaky grip on lyricism. I told one of my homies I had finally heard the last Gucci tape and raved about the new kid he put on a few tracks, and he pointed me in the direction of 1017 Thug. I got caught up in finals and arguments with the girl around whom I seemed to frequently make an ass of myself, but got around to sitting down with the tape about a month or so later.

What I heard was a slightly unhinged, silly, drug-addled and fun-loving project by Thugga and his cohorts. It wasn’t about anything: the songs about that you’d figure to be about any one thing aren’t much more than rhyming ramblings on 1017-affiliate boilerplate. But the charisma, beat selection, the voice Thug’s attention commands, his attention to melody and the simple catchiness of his hooks make for an entertaining project you just can’t stop listening to despite the brief but myriad journeys into complete insanity. His recent output is more of the same. “Stoner”, his track that peaked at #47 on the top 100 chart, gets moderate play on tri-state radio heavyweight stations and has become a go-to selection for Nae Nae enthusiasts. He’s popped up on songs with Tyga and milk carton candidate Rich Homie Quan, released a few joint tapes with Gucci, has been spotted with Birdman sporting a Rich Gang chain, recently killed the first verse of a song with Tip and has yet to answer to the considerable amount of controversy surrounding his label situation. On the musical front, Thug is only slightly more important than any of the other moderately important Atlanta upstarts to preceed him. He’s a more entertaining figure than the plodding, trap-by-numbers Young Scooter, He’s yet to find a smash like Quan. The whole of his persona, his social media output, interviews, dress code and affiliations make him an interesting case for Hip Hop, which makes him an interesting case for something more.

Thugga’s southern-ness is inescapable, as it is for the majority of southern rappers who garner any attention, though not necessarily the case for any rappers who gain bonafide stardom. Rick Ross, TI, Young Jeezy, B.O.B., Lil Wayne and Andre 3000 as a solo feature artist post-’Kast, have all spent time at or near the eye of the genre’s storm while masking or discarding their southern-ness at times. The case could be made that the degree to which they’ve successfully circumvented their area codes of origin has determined their longevity a top-billing acts: Ross’ style has become less Miami dope boy and more classic rap mafioso, Jeezy’s kept fairly true to his ATL roots and while garnering equal or greater respect in rap circles isn’t as big of a mainstream draw as Ross. Wayne leapfrogged stars as his style looked north for inspiration, B.O.B. has eschewed both his ATL and his rap roots for any viability as a mainstream star act. Part of this could be pragmatic: the whole target audience doesn’t live in or have any contact with the south, and executives aren’t the most adventurous with records they push— an accent here or there might determine the backing your single gets. But it can’t be ignored that southern rap has always suffered from the same stereotypes that southern Blacks suffered from before the advent of rap music. An accent that tips listeners to roots south of the Mason-Dixon may have the same effect on radio listeners as it does folks in conversation: southern accents are tied to slow wits, lessened expectations, poor taste and a lack of class. Nevermind the fact that southern rap is just a southern fried take on the same Black lower class male power fantasy that emcees from NY, LA, Detroit and Chicago indulge in, nevermind that the culture surrounding the music is different down bottom as it is in every other city mentioned, nobody’s ever let facts stand in the way of a stereotype. Thug’s southern-ness, again, can’t be escaped. Neither can the fact that he’s just plain weird. But the weirdness is a type that we have yet to see given any meaningful space in the mainstream when attached to a southern act. While lacking the personality and rap skill of Russell Jones or Kool Keith, they’re two of the only apt comparisons that can be drawn. In the same way rap won by broadening its horizons past the empire state with the advent of west coast rap, so too could it win with an acceptance of a new breed of weirdos, for two reasons. First, weirdos at the fringes of the mainstream serve to stretch the palette of the average listener, De La Soul and Ultramagnetic MCs be praised. Thug is in a position unique to even those acts as his weirdness doesn’t necessarily extend his content far outside of what the mainstream listener has come to expect. De La put a flower in the barrel of big bad Rap’s gun, Young Thug would like to make it known that we can hold our gun sideways. Next, it could be the impetus behind some future music that stretches the rigidity of what mainstream hip hop presents and what its listeners have come to expect from artists old and new. With the exception of offerings by Kanye West, every major rap album has more or less fallen in line with the post-Blueprint album formula. A full-length major label debut by Young Thug without any of the pressures of sales, sans talking heads, might just be the most devil-may-care, balls-to-the-wall release offered in years. A pipe dream, yes, but if it did happen and spawned a few successful singles and a decent opening sales performance, we could see labels open their arms a little wider to what we’re not seeing: artists being themselves when labels get a hold, no matter what they themselves may be.

Young Thug also comes at a time when rap music is evolving as the musical diets of its listeners evolves. Mainstream music has become the clearest illustration of the melting pot America claims to be when it comes to Black bodies: blackness is loved best when Black faces are erased or marginalized (See Cyrus, Miley, Macklemore, Twerking classes, etc.). Not only that, but the homogenization of different genres into musical McMansions, houses that resemble each other in some way or another enough to suggest a common ancestor, has allowed (or forced) the average rap listener to branch out. We have 808s on country records, the guy who made “Slob On My Knob” topped charts with the girl who dated John Mayer, and the guy who produced “Superthug” nearly won a Grammy for a song he did for a children’s movie. Steven Tyler’s dream has been realized and the walls between genres are as porous as they’ve ever been. Mainstream Rap, with a few notable exceptions, has been stubborn to accept this change as a whole. Nicki Minaj, Drake, Kanye, Wayne, Jay, A$AP Rocky, and others have been equally celebrated and shouted down for any and all of their attempts to incorporate or borrow from other genres on recent outings, though the rest of the mainstream landscape with even fewer exceptions finds themselves beating dead stylistic and lyrical horses. To put it simply, with the musical landscape changing due to the introduction of EDM to the mainstream, with acts making less money and selling fewer records, and in light of the fact that this Jeezy fan would be hard pressed to choose between seeing him or the Arctic Monkeys, rap’s failure to evolve and join the race may make it the Rock n’ Roll of its day: a once proudly and unabashedly Black musical staple that went White, cleaved off and left its Black sister-genre, R&B in Rock’s case, to race for second place. Thug’s beat selection and use of medley, as well as his…err…daring dress code make it clear that while living comfortably in Rap’s wheelhouse, he’s taken some peeks outside and pulled some influence in. Beyond that, Thug seems to be content with exhibiting just enough mic skill to separate him from rappers taken less seriously. Again, he’s no Scarface, he’d have to be in a zone to give you a whole project on par with Willie D, but he can Bushwick Bill his ass off at times, and with Gucci’s influence, he’s capable of a few lines here and that can be called genuinely well written. This is less aberrant than rap fans are comfortable admitting. The Black Eyes Peas put out bona fide rap records and enjoyed the mainstream viability of J5, then added Fergie, dropped the rappity-rap, and become The BEP that the middle-aged White lady in your office listens to on the treadmill. Nicki Minaj rapped her ass off for years, killed a track with rappers previously mentioned, and delivered an EP worth of quality raps on her first album…and followed it up with an album full of songs that sounded like Britney Spears reference tracks. B.O.B. released a very good mixtape, grabbed a major deal, put out the simp anthem of 2010 and hasn’t looked back. Rapping to unrap- showing skill to cast it aside- is as mainstream Rap as apple pie is American. Still, a successful Thugga debut that allows him to march to his own drum may be the moment that artists and listeners point to as the moment the unrapping phenomenon we’ve seen is laid to rest, where Black artists don’t have to prove their Black artistry to us only to cast it aside to prove their star power to them.

Rap, despite some artists’ refusal to cop to this reality, is firmly entrenched as at least a partial reflection or barometer for Black culture. It’s plagued by the same isms, shortcomings, eccentricity and foibles as we are as a people. Young Thug is, for mainstream rap, much of we have been slow to accept and fully include: He dresses and talks funny, his sexuality has been in constant question since his arrival on the mainstream stage. He’s weird, and Negritude has rarely held weird in high regard, nor have we tried to do more with it than sweep it under the rug. Weird in all of its incarnations is seen as either weakness or an aspiration towards Whiteness. Young Thug can’t be accused of either, at least not in any way unique to him relative to the rest of the Black acts to pop up on Billboard lists recently. Rap has a long history of hating change until it loves it and then acting as if the former never occurred. You can’t find many people who will readily cop to being ardent, vociferous ‘Ye haters around the time College Dropout released, but they were there. You can’t find many who will admit to not fucking with those hippies in De La Soul, but they didn’t hop on a rocket and take their outrage elsewhere, they were and are still here. The ability to welcome Thug, complete with the questions concerning his sexuality, his wardrobe and his spot left of center, while still holding him to the same judgement and standards and critique that other acts are held to, would be a tremendously positive development. Make no mistake, this writer isn’t pulling for Thugger because he’s weird, but because he’s weird and good and weird and good can often bring about more of the same.

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