Young Thug Declares that We Don’t Give a Fuck
A SNIPPET FROM “AFRO-SURREALISM AND HIP HOP: DECOLONIZING BLACK ARTISTIC EXPRESSION”
“I went on the stand and told the judge pass my cup!” (2:15)
- Young Thug on “FRANCHISE”
On the cover of his most recent studio album, released prior to his incarceration in May of 2022, Young Thug, who also goes by SEX or simply Jeffery, pays homage to the “Forever Always” painting by Mexican surrealist artist, Octavio Ocampo. He transforms Ocampo’s love story into a surrealist tale about the two sides to his artistic expression. His bright pink dreads garnish two Thugger faces, one whose face is formed by a Thug playing a game of dice with a stack of cash in his loving embrace and the other face formed by a Thug playing a banjo. It is important to me to mention that Ocampo’s original golden goblet was replaced by an ice-y cup of lean in Thug’s depiction.
Within a pink hued dream, Thug finds himself positioned between a present realm of both perceived and lived black culture (for him, at least) of drug use, riches, and playing street dice and a historical realm of Southern black artistry which has since been rebranded as “White People Shit.” Young Thug has been fond of this country music formulation of his artistic identity for some time now, with Beautiful Thugger Girls being his biggest, most critically acclaimed folk-country-trap genre blending endeavor— a bold act of Creolization. Music critic Judnick Maynard says of the album, “[it’s] more than a country album: the music isn't his master, instead he bends it to his will… a testament to Young Thug's constantly evolving creative reach” (Maynard 2017, par. 2).
This is Thug’s AfroSurrealism: “For black folks, who were systematically removed from the narrative to uphold the Johnny Cashs of the world, we know that country music is fused with our culture just as much as the cowboys who now hurl racial slurs at non-white attendees during festivals and rodeos” (Maynard 2017, par. 1). Thugger draws back on the suppressed black origins of country music and brings the true history of it to light, contradicted by country-music fanatics’ ironic disdain for trap and Black American culture as a whole. The past days of negro spirituals and the playing of the West African banjar, that had fallen invisible to the hands of white revisionist history, on the plantation are resurrected through Young Thugs juxtaposition. He sings of working all day while being high all day in his crooning timbre. Thug embraces the perceived contradiction within this newfound Creolized black identity within modernity— a sad tale of spiritual highs found after intense labor through drugs and fame and sex, while acknowledging genre (and gender) limitations forcing themselves onto black music and artistry. He destroys the white “objective” reality of what classifies as country music in a vulgar reclamation of black history, Negritude, and decolonization. In AfroSurrealist fashion he “use[s] excess as the only legitimate means of subversion, and hybridization as a form of disobedience” (Miller 2009, 116). His “fuck the rules!” mentality seeps through his music and absorbs itself into his artistic identity, as a huge cluster-fuck of seemingly nonsensical and un-pinpointable trap material: “Scotts with no strings, you can’t tie me” (Travis Scott, Young Thug, M.I.A 2020, 1:32) .
When he wore a pastel purple Asian-inspired hat with a long ruffled dress designed by Italian designer Alessandro Trincone on the cover of his fourth commercial mixtape, JEFFERY (2016), it was met with much controversy as Hip Hop manifests itself as a hyper-masculine and homophobic cesspool under the limited reality of blackness within a society built upon black abjection. But he unabashedly draws from pre-colonial history, prior to the limiting western conception of black masculinity and strengthens Miller’s definition of “Afro” in AfroSurrealism within that very conical hat: “The root for ‘Afro-’ can be found in ‘Afro-Asiatic,’ meaning a shared language between black, brown, and Asian peoples of the world” (Miller 2009, 114).
Conceptions of gender pre-colonialism were much more fluid in various African, Asian, and Indigenous communities. Mohammed Elnaiem’s “The ‘Deviant’ African Genders That Colonialism Condemned” details the “sodomy” condemned by European invaders when they first interacted with Angola (Elnaiem 2021). When the Europeans landed on African soil, they imported their Christian gender view with them— colonial importation: “the ironic truth is that it is not homosexuality that is alien to Africa but the far off lands of Sodom and Gomorrah plus the many other religious depictions of other sexuality that are often quoted in condemning same-sex relations on the continent” (Tamale 2013, 36). But with them also came a colonially imported view of not just what masculinity looks like in their “objective” reality, but also what Black Masculinity looked like in their “objective” reality and how it was supposed to be performed. “Black/brown men are often cast as excessively violent” and yet they remained/remain subservient to the white man above them, crucified upon a cross of violence that was actually being inflicted upon them (Orleus 2010, 67-69). It was only through this colonial importation of ideology, where the colonized and the enslaved learned of the functionality of masculinity on this foreign land, foreign reality: “If privileged and straight white males have established the norm and standard of masculinity for all men from slavery on, and enslaved and freed black/brown men have throughout history impersonated this form of masculinity, it is then reasonable to assume that black masculinity is end result of white males' social and historical construction of masculinity” (Orleus 2010, 70). This conception of a violent Black Masculinity was learned and forcibly inherited, it was never intuitive.
And Young Thug is well aware of this as he says in a Calvin Klien advertisement, “In my world, you can be a gangsta with a dress or you can be a gangsta with baggy pants. I feel like there's no such thing as gender.” What world is this? The AfroSurrealist world of Thugger, of SEX, of Jeffery, and of his many other aliases: “The Afrosurrealist life is fluid, filled with aliases and census-defying classifications” (Miller 2009, 116). This is the AfroSurrealist world that unveils the true complexity of Black Masculinity which we have been conditioned to accept as a simple threat. The pendulum that Black Masculinity swings from sways constantly between inherited notions of femininity and masculinity. Thug disavows the static nature of his masculinity and reclaims the fluidity for his freeing artistic expression; the trap artist wearing a dress and making country-trap is truly not that absurd considering black history. When Thug raps, “Had to wear the dress, 'cause I had a stick” he shows us “the historical past of black/brown men has been shadowing [him] since [he was] born” (Young Thug 2019, 0:16; Orleus 2010, 67). He creates an echo chamber of surrealism that is so ironic that one cannot help but both laugh and weep, as he had once upon a time. But, now, Thug just simply does not give a fuck about neither gender nor genre distinctions.
In his hesitance towards Lil Nas-X’s decision to come out as gay, Thug stated, “These days, motherfuckers, it’s just all judgment… Motherfuckers is just judging. It ain’t even about the music no more. Once you found out he was gay, as soon as the song come on now, everybody like, ‘This gay-ass nigga’…Niggas don’t even care to listen to the song no more.” He is well aware of the projection of hyper-masculinity within Hip Hop, but he encourages us to dispel our emphasis on sexual orientation and gender expression when appreciating black artistry.
Thug is, personally, unafraid to be called gay by his peers, and unafraid to disrespect the white powers designed to oppress and confine him within the intersection between his race and gender identity. That’s why he asks the judge to pass him his damn cup of lean, as he faces a life sentence for the violence that shaped his reality. Thug is unafraid to reclaim country music as his own; he’ll take the exaggerated southern accent they claimed as their own, mock it, and spit it back in their face as he raps about his genitals over a banjo trap beat. He’s unafraid to “make black comedy out of irrepressible sound,” rapping what the world calls gibberish to express himself whether it be through his iconic verse on “Lifestyle” or "his hoohoos and melismas and blahs and mwas and frogcroaks and put-puts [which] are the message” (Christgau 2016). His existence as an artist is in and of itself a disobedience which decolonizes our understanding of Black Masculinity, in Hip Hop and outside of it, and our understanding of genre ownership.
Even in this grim process, he labels his debut commercial album, So Much Fun (2019). Thug finds enjoyment and freedom in destroying dichotomies and springing forth as an artist “bigger than the president” (Metro Boomin 2022, 1:20). He envisions himself as bigger than the systems working to oppress him, metaphorically in exposing an oversimplified reality, and literally because he seems to be presently living the liberating and fluid dream that was not supposed to be his through his music even while imprisoned.
art credit: josephkirkhamart