Art via Evan Solano
Harley Geffner still wants to know if Project T-Pain is 03 Greedo’s best album?
Where do we even start? First, Thug is rapping rapping, and he remains one of the greatest to ever do it. Has he lost a step? I’m not sure. Much of his output and leaks from the last five years do stand up to the rest of his catalog, but he’s rarely as melodically experimental as he has been in the past, instead clicking his notes and flows into place more neatly. He sounds very good on “Closing Arguments,” but it’s not really my flavor of Thug as much as the more melodic and warbly stuff. I theorize that he’s a bit more clear-headed now after all he’s been through, and also, he’s seemingly sober, so it makes sense that he’s locking into pockets that feel more sonically in-line with what one would think would sound good. He was always at his best though when he wasn’t thinking and just going off instinct. But he does sound good, and some might say, the best he’s sounded in a while.
Now there’s a lot to dissect here with regards to the song, the leaked jail calls, and ultimately one of the most fascinating interviews from a human standpoint I’ve seen in the last 5 years. Thug sat down with Big Bank to discuss allegations of snitching, what it means to be a man, his influences and what shaped his world view, one of the worst-run court cases in memory, and ultimately the hurt and betrayal he felt from actions his friends took during the trial.
With full transparency here, I’m still struggling to digest it all. There’s so much grey area everywhere, and assigning honor, morality, or lack thereof to any party involved feels like going too deep into the voyeuristic “hood-ologist” analysis, which benefits nobody. It is easy to pick sides or draw judgments on people involved, but we need to remember that every single person in this trial has been subjected to what amounts to psychological torture at every step along the way in this process. The incredibly shady prosecutorial tricks are par for the course, but it doesn’t make them any less shocking and horrible.
Entire lives are staked on the turn of a phrase in court. Children wait at home while the directions of their lives are unwittingly being determined by events outside of their control. Huge pendulums of potential outcomes swing by the second. Blood and family are being ripped apart by a system designed to get loved ones to turn on each other out of desperate acts of self-preservation. It all gets to the core of who we are as people, and back to these strict or really implicit codes of morality, and as Thug says 100 times in the interview, “being a man.”
I think what I’m trying to say is that there needs to be sympathy for everyone involved here. Thug didn’t even seem to realize how much this all was hurting him, and he was put in an incredibly vulnerable position over and over again. I can’t imagine what it feels like to lose trust in basically all of your closest confidants. It must be incredibly lonely, and as humans, we all seek connection, and loneliness, like true isolation, is one of the worst feelings imaginable. We also should feel for everyone who felt their backs were against the wall to the point that they had to accept a plea deal that could hurt other people they loved. Those are difficult decisions, and ones that will shape the rest of their lives.
We should feel for the judges in this case, forced to reckon with these difficult real-life situations that are so outside of their areas of expertise or cultural norms in their lives. The lawyers are hand-tied by law, whether fair or not. Lawmakers looking to create the most fair possible system of rules are put in an impossible situation as well, even without considering money from special interest groups that call into question whether they are even trying to be fair. Who is to decide what is moral, what is right, where the legal lines should be drawn? The victims’ families have had to go through hell watching this all unfold every day. Even the jurors were ripped away from their lives to go through years of procedural bullshit. Fans of these artists have had to reckon with all of this as well. The tentacles and externalities from this trial will continue to echo far beyond just the walls of the Fulton County Courthouse.
It is probably a cop out to not come down on anyone’s side here. But fuck that, this is real life, and these are complicated situations that deserve requisite amounts of nuance and understanding. It takes understanding to know we won’t understand all of it either. That’s okay. These are peoples’ personal real-life problems that have come under the public eye and subjected to massive online scrutiny from people who truly will never come close to understanding the situations and the complexities at hand. The more we know about all of this, the more subjective and flimsy any “takes,” on it at all seem.
The best we can do is to watch from afar, sympathize with everyone who was put through this torturous process, and hope none of this animosity spills into any further violence than what the state has already inflicted on these families. We can assess what our own moral code is, and how far we are willing to go for the people we love. We can look at our own definitions of masculinity, the principles that guide us, cold strategy, selfishness and selflessness, and try to find the balance that we feel most comfortable living in between all these poles. I hope Thug and every person involved with this enormous farce of a trial is able to find peace in their own way.
Imagine if Santa had grills, smoked backwoods, and bumped rap from his sleigh while speeding through the intercontinental wind currents. The top is dropped, he’s got on some Cartier buffs, his Santa suit is custom Raf, and he’s blowing ‘em down while tossing dime bags through chimneys. This is the music I imagine such a Santa would play on his annual journey across the world, which we can imagine as more of a hajj to Atlanta for this Santa than anything else.
“Dnt Feel Em’ Yet” is the sound of this drippy Santa stunting while tip-toeing over rooftops. The bells that hold down the beat sound like snowflakes. This is the backdrop of a hood ballet. Guapo, out of Houston, opens the song floating through those currents rapping about how the only man he idolizes other than God is Ben Franklin. Very capitalist and… very Santa, if you ask me. He double times the flow and catches a real nice pocket before Ffawty, hailing from the U.S. Virgin Islands, but residing in Miami at the moment, gives the song an injection of energy. The tension builds throughout each of the rapper’s verses, but Ffawty really stands out with the way he moves from a low, nasally growl reminiscent of Guapo’s, into a more standard cadence, where his almost Patois-adjacent accent cuts through the track, and then into a Keed-like squawk that wraps the whole thing up with a bow that smells faintly of Za.
Yes I know ian is, at times, the avatar for all we collectively hate. Counterpoint: this song is hard and he basically stands his ground with two modern titans of rap in DC’s Nino Paid and Georgia’s Lazer Dim 700. He’s the least charismatic of the three in both delivery and the bars, but his presence on the song, even just as a foil for the other guys to bounce off, makes the song better. Lazer Dim and Nino both rib at ian, with Nino mentioning that he’s a bad influence and shouldn’t be near ian, but he’s in on the joke and plays it up as a good sport. It’s a fun song and the guys look like they’re having fun messing around in a mansion overlooking Lake Como. That energy is infectious and makes for a good listen.
Baltimore’s Shordie Shordie has always had a soft touch on the track, but it feels like his songs are getting even more meditative as he gets deeper into his career. Love the interpolation of that Kaytranada + Teedra Moses in the clip at the end, plus I’m a sucker for any video with the words freestyle and snippet in the title.
Home team bias of course, but the Stinc team’s roster has been benefitting from internal improvement and continuity more than any rap collective operating. These more tangential players seem to get better and better every day, finding new quirks in their flows so it’s not all just watered down Drakeo-isms. With this song, Gmoney and Playerrways really find something. Money starts off rapping like he’s creeping around a corner late at night. His flow is slithery and measured like he’s tactically stalking his prey, and it builds as the dark beat builds with it. Then Playerrways jumps in, skipping the stalking part and jumping right into the pouncing with a flurry of haymakers.
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