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White Girl in Young Thug Video Again

The Atlanta rapper Young Thug. His day's are self-directed, frenetic, prone to detours. He may not be the only renegade left in hip-hop, but he's certainly the most intriguing.

Credit... Chad Batka for The New York Times

SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. — Merely after midnight on the day in August that Young Thug turned 24, he sat impassively as a makeup artist practical ghoulish white gunk to his face up.

A small coiffure was using his firm in this serenity, bucolic suburb just n of Atlanta to moving picture a video for "Best Friend," his zippy new song. Thug's head — anybody calls him Thug, though he was born Jeffrey Williams — was to popular up from under a serving dish lid on his dining room table and rap while a couple of his sisters sat around the tabular array, dancing in their chairs.

Thug ashed a blunt into a ramen container while his director, Exist El Be, set upwards the lighting. Ane hour passed. Then two, then three. One of his sons — he has six children — was passed out on a couch. Food arrived at random intervals: four Dominos pizzas in the late evening, a birthday cake just subsequently midnight, a couple of catering trays of wings at 1:30 a.m.

Eventually, the weed cloud in the room got cotton fiber-candy thick, and Thug was called to the dining room for his scene.

This is how Young Thug's days get: self-directed, frenetic, prone to detours. He may non exist the simply renegade left in hip-hop, but he's certainly the nearly intriguing. For the terminal couple of years, he's been 1 of the almost crucial innovators in the genre, a master of bending his vocalism into radical shapes. His signature gobbledygook helped propel "Lifestyle," by Rich Gang (which besides features Baby and Rich Homie Quan), to No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. It's the stuff of several outstanding mixtapes, including "1017 Thug," "I Came From Nothing three" and "Black Portland." It has anchored street anthems like "Stoner" and "Danny Glover," and added zest and quirk to songs with T.I., Rae Sremmurd, Nicki Minaj and more.

Harnessing his sui generis gift has been a more than perplexing challenge: Thug moves at his ain rhythm. On any given mean solar day, at that place are songs being recorded (or not), videos being filmed (or non), an album being finished (or not). His proper major label debut, "Hy!£UN35," on 300/Atlantic, has a seemingly elastic release engagement. There are squabbles with other rappers, misunderstandings with his girlfriend, a gaggle of family members always in close orbit. A day with Thug pinballs from one twist to the next.

Several hours subsequently, after some sleep, Thug was in the screening room on the second flooring of the impressively sized, mostly brownish and beige house, obsessively scrolling through Instagram and taking birthday calls. His stringy dreadlocks were gathered in a loose bun and dyed a misty greyness. His teeth were gilt. His Apple watch was ringed with diamonds. Versace boxer briefs poked out atop asphyxiatingly thin Balmain jeans.

Downstairs, family members were gathering for a birthday light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation-tag outing. Simply every few minutes, it seemed like something might grab Thug's attending and spin it in a new direction.

Prototype

Credit... Chad Batka for The New York Times

He was talking most the public's perception of him — "There's zippo that they think that'southward right" — when he stopped cold for a infinitesimal. His girlfriend of a couple of years, Jerrika, had just texted him. Days earlier, with no warning, she had accused Thug of disloyalty in an Instagram post — "Some people are so broken that they are unable to be loved," she wrote.

"I'grand frustrated," he said. "She but dipped off on me. Why you do that? Yous gonna merely exit me in this business firm like this? You one of the main reasons I got it!"

For much of the past year, the ii have painted a refreshing moving picture of shared bliss on social media, just Jerrika had read some compromising texts on his phone. Thug insisted his infidelities were virtual, non actual. "I merely was, like, being a mack, being lame like, 'I miss you,' If a ho' text me right at present I'd exist like: 'What you doing? Come see me.' Only I don't want no ho' to run across me." Jerrika didn't believe him. (At press time, they'd reunited.)

A few minutes later, his publicist appeared to ask if a new video, "Again," should exist posted online given Thug'due south contempo legal troubles. In the video, Thug is surrounded by a comical amount of guns and drugs — all props, his manager said. A month earlier, the local police and the A.T.F. had raided this aforementioned house after Thug was arrested on suspicion of making terroristic threats to a security officer at Perimeter Mall in Atlanta. In news footage, officers could be seen going through the cars on the property, and one of his sisters tried to physically block the cameraman from filming.

Thug seemed to be handing the attention with a shrug. He took a minute to phone call his lawyer but got voicemail. He went back to Instagram. The video went upwardly the side by side day.

Another break: Lyor Cohen, the macher of 300, checking in via FaceTime from his New York beach business firm, was wearing a robe and singing "Happy Altogether." Mr. Cohen swept the camera around his domicile. "You come across the sailboats out in that location?" he asked. Thug asked him for a Scarlet Dragon camera for his birthday. "Let me see what I can do about that, son," Mr. Cohen replied.

A few days before, Thug had been in the New York role of 300, where the walls are covered in vintage hip-hop photos of 1980s and 1990s rappers. Thug regarded them like documentation of an ancient, strange culture, recognizing virtually none of them.

Young Thug isn't 100 per centum ahistorical, but he'due south happy not to be encumbered by the genre's quondam expectations and frameworks. As a young rapper, he idolized Lil Wayne, and fiddling else. Now he has surpassed his idol, and at a tricky moment: Lil Wayne has lately been squabbling with Infant, the tape executive who long served as his surrogate father, and Baby has been doting attending and time on Young Thug. In Apr, Lil Wayne's tour motorcoach was shot at in Atlanta, and the police have attempted to necktie Baby and Young Thug to the incident.

"I got millions to get, I'm not running effectually shooting no damn bus," Thug said.

Thug and Lil Wayne have also squared off over music. In April, Thug released "Barter 6," what he described as a continuation of Lil Wayne'due south "Carter" mixtape series, to Lil Wayne's displeasure: "I'm not just being lame or trying to do something smoothen. I told the whole world y'all my idol, and whenever you stop I'm gonna keep going.

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Credit... Eliana Rowe/Metropolis Parks Foundation

"Both of us grew up the aforementioned thing, the aforementioned gang man — Y.M.C.M.B.," he continued, referring to the empire Infant built. "Why should you e'er in your life even feel similar we against each other?"

At Lil Wayne'southward peak, he was recording dozens of songs a month. Thug does much the same, a practice he adult while working under the currently incarcerated Atlanta legend Gucci Mane. For more than than a yr, Thug watched him: "Three stories, real business firm, studio built in them, five different studios, five rooms, never left."

The studio is the place where the swirl of activeness around Thug calms down the most. Shortly before his birthday, he was in New York for a typically jam-packed twenty-four hours: filming scenes for the video of "I Know There's Gonna Be (Practiced Times)," his single with the British producer Jamie 20; doing a quick Boiler Room performance with Jamie xx; then retiring to Platinum Sound, a cozy warren studio in a nondescript Midtown building for a late-night session.

At the studio, Thug kicked off his shoes to reveal pristine white socks and ate cashews one at a time while talking about his gambling predilections: "I used to go defenseless at school with like 10 pair of dice. I lost over $100,000 with LeBron James and didn't watch not 1 game."

Mr. Tumay loaded up some music, beginning with already finished songs, and eventually cycled through a gear up of new beats. Meanwhile Thug talked nigh his contempo abort at the mall. "I literally be walking in at that place with lean, gun in my pants. It's no cops in there ever." The judge, he said, was sympathetic: "He said: 'Yous spent $10,000 on that twenty-four hour period when y'all threatened him. Why would I non let you go the mall?' "

After a few minutes of banter, Thug picked a beat by Mike Will Fabricated It and, Styrofoam cup of prescription cough syrup in paw, retreated into the booth. The lights were out — all yous could see was the glint of his Rich Gang concatenation.

The recording process began with some melodic mumbles. Thug figures the lyrics out piecemeal. He doesn't allow himself to leave the booth until the vocal is finished. He writes nothing downwardly.

So he saturday in the night and, a few words at a fourth dimension, congenital the song from scratch. He wrote his own melodies and countermelodies. From the command room, y'all could hear him going over sure sections dozens of times, as if he were pushing against a huge boulder until information technology moved just a bit, so steeling himself to do it all again

Somewhen, the hook came to sound like something the reggae vocalizer Barrington Levy might do, a plangent wail. In the verse, he veered from sentimental — "I was and then jealous when I caught you lot flirting" — to roughshod: "I'm a dog on these ho's, no vet."

Near thirty minutes after he began, Thug had the song finished. Mr. Tumay played it dorsum for him a couple of times. The studio was still, near dull. Still sitting in the dark, Thug asked, "Desire me to ad lib?" He had nowhere else to be.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/arts/music/weathering-young-thugs-tornado.html

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