Only two and a half years passed between the day Young Thug and his YSL crew were indicted on RICO charges and the day he was released, but in that time the world underwent a massive transformation. Streamers started acting as reporters; TikTok and Instagram Reels became the way the average young person got their news; candidates on the 2024 presidential ballot appealed to their base by doing bits on podcasts. To be a star in anything right now—from politics to mainstream hip-hop—is to be a content creator.
In 2019, Young Thug got a taste of superstardom with So Much Fun, his first No. 1 album after years of pumping out some of the greatest and most eccentric Atlanta rap ever. It was like when your favorite mid-budget director starts making $100-million Hollywood blockbusters, and Thug pulled it off by still having a good-ass time amid all the polish. He’s been on a mission to keep that status and fame intact ever since, watering down his music in the process. “I just had to dumb it down… the world couldn’t catch on to it,” he said about his past style in a particularly annoying and homophobic recent podcast clip.
Then, in 2022, came jail and, in 2023, the YSL trial circus, during which Young Thug seemingly went through considerable mental and financial strain. Meanwhile, salacious Instagram blogs fanned the flames, treating the trial like reality television, as minor YSL members turned into YouTube stars. In 2022, Gunna, the co-face of YSL, took a plea deal, which has been endlessly interpreted by his rap peers, internet personalities, and internet bots as “snitching” on Thug. By the time Thug was freed, the rap ecosystem was more interested to find out whether he would embrace or denounce Gunna than what his new music might sound like. Thug announced and pushed back his comeback album, UY SCUTI, a couple times. But after the release of leaked calls from his time in jail, where he’s recorded talking spicy about the entire popular hip-hop community, he finally gave into the new internet landscape: with X rants; with an unhinged podcast appearance calling out Gunna; with diss-heavy “leaked” songs made to be clipped on social media—in other words, with content.
Content is much of what UY SCUTI is, too. Named after a red supergiant star (one of the largest known stars in the universe), it’s a boringly chaotic album so desperate for attention that Thug turns himself into a meme. The tone is set by the album cover, an edit of Thug going full Sammy Sosa with bleached skin and light eyes. It’s funny, but doesn’t feel pointed enough to be satirical—like the whiteface of the Wayans brothers’ White Chicks or of Melvin Van Peebles’ Watermelon Man—or provocative, like when Thug wore a dress for the 2016 artwork of Jeffery; instead, it seems designed only to shock and go viral. There’s no real point (though if you’re being generous, you could interpret his half-assed explanation to mean that everyone would eat up this album if he were white) other than for Thug to pop up in your algorithm by any means necessary.
Even UY SCUTI’s songs feel engineered for that purpose. “Whoopty Doo,” built around a viral quote from his interview on Perspektives With Bank, exists for no other reason than to be played ironically. I’ll admit, the ridiculousness of it got a laugh out of me on the first listen, but once the surprise wore off, I was deeply uninterested in his uninspired chants of the title phrase or the mildly funky beat that switches up like a bloodshot “Sicko Mode.” The same could be said for the seven-minute apology “Miss My Dogs,” one of the phoniest songs I’ve heard in a minute. In response to all of his industry gossip in the leaked jails calls, Thug begs for friendship: specifically, from the rappers bigger than him and whose collabs make him a ton of money—Drake, Future, Lil Baby (aka Wham, of course), 21 Savage, Gucci—by telling them how awesome of a guy he is. He’s a little more vulnerable in the verse directed at his girlfriend, Mariah the Scientist, though his admission of, “One of my biggest fears is losing you to the internet” shows you how blurred his reality is right now. And hey, if none of that makes you feel anything, he hammers home the emotion with a big, sweeping vocal sample of an AI soul band that sounds like a knockoff Silk Sonic. I’m offended he’d even think soulless Motown ripoffs turned into even shittier and more soulless Motown ripoffs would move us.
It’s hard to take any of this music seriously, even as he responds to his tumultuous last three years with wounded Southern pain rap. This isn’t the first time he’s taken his sound in a gentler direction, but it’s nowhere near as earnest as, say, Beautiful Thugger Girls, which, with all its naked, voice-cracking melodies, felt like a genuine expression of love and sorrow. Here, the weepy pianos and stripped-down acoustics just feel like Thug’s waveriding of Rod Wave, the Florida sadboy who has been one of rap’s streaming goliaths of the 2020s. Thug is decent at the style, though. “On the News” has arguably the album’s most heartfelt hook and is bookended by a shot-throwing Cardi B verse that’s better than anything on her new album. His broken falsetto on “Blaming Jesus” makes him sound like a sparrow with an injured wing. Wheezy puts some omph into the gloom of “Catch Me I’m Falling,” as Thug sings, “Turned me to a felon now nobody would hire me/This rap shit gotta sell ’cause that’s the only commodity,” an impressively honest admission that his bogus circumstances have forced him to squeeze as much money out of this album as possible.
But so many of these songs keep on returning to Gunna, and at this point, whether he really means it or not, Thug’s endless references to their shattered brotherhood feel like another way to juice streams. “I been cryin’ all day/I seen my brother turn rat in my face,” he says, in a whimpery singsong on “Sad Spider,” sounding about as real as a kid tryna manipulatively pout their way into an extra scoop of ice cream. On “Dreams Rarely Do Come True,” a messy six-minute ballad with Mariah, he goes, “Why would I cry over a bitch I gave to Gunna police-ass?” and it completely throws off one of the more emotionally complex verses on the album. These days, it’s hard to tell with Thug what’s a bit and what’s not, which undermines every moment of potential sincerity.
What clearly isn’t a bit is Thug’s desire to be relevant. Maybe that’s always been the case, but long gone are the days of his creative peak, when it seemed like he was making music in a chamber walled off from society. There’s rarely any stylistic flair to his vocals anymore; so often, he’s doing a milquetoast rap-sing that makes him sound like everyone else in the Atlanta mainstream rap circuit. Have some pride! But maybe that’s too much to ask of music that is just a vehicle to go viral and hit the top of the charts.
That might explain “Ninja,” one of the most shameless rap songs in Thug’s catalog. It’s the album intro, so it starts off predictably, with the audio of a prosecutor from the trial talking about Thug like he’s Michael Corleone. Then the beat drops, one of those 808-heavy Southside beats that I got tired of a half-decade ago, and after a little flexing Thug builds up to the song’s big moment: about 30 straight seconds of him hollering “I’m callin’ my opps nigger” in various ways. That’s right, chanting “nigger”—in a Hank Hill-like accent, I’d like to add. It’s so dumb and corny, just bottom-of-the-barrel edgelord trolling. The day after the song was released, Thug got on the phone with mega-popular right-wing streamer Adin Ross, who was giddy about the song. Live on stream, Thug doubled down, and Ross tried to hold in his laughter. Thug was being treated as a joke for all the white teenagers watching him on the internet. But at that moment, all that seemed to matter to him was that they were watching.
