At the start of the summer of 2019, designer and DJ Virgil Abloh debuted his third collection of apparel at the helm of Louis Vuitton with a high-profile show in Paris. In July, not long after a surprising performance at Nickelodeon’s Kids Choice Awards, the trendsetting rap trio Migos headlined the U.K.’s massive Wireless Festival with Cardi B. Then, in August, their friend and ATL contemporary Young Thug finally dropped his long-awaited “debut” album (a little absurd for someone who had 22 bodies of work prior, though they were largely billed as mixtapes and often felt like it). It was the inaugural Hot Girl Summer, it was the season hard seltzer took off — it was the best of times.
With immense foresight, Young Thug called that debut So Much Fun. The album bustled with rhythm and play. Thug had perfected an off-kilter musicality inherited from Lil Wayne, combined with his own chaotic senses of melody and verbiage, and that summer, he was ready to bring it to the masses. It became Thug’s mainstream coronation — his first Number One on Billboard’s Top Albums chart. So Much Fun explained why so many people have copied Young Thug’s style since, and why still he remains so singular. He had long known he was the one, he told Rolling Stone in 2021. “I literally knew that people were going to do what I do, because it’s cool, I’m fire,” he said.
Summer 2019 was the last one of normalcy before a pandemic of unseen proportions gripped the globe, before America’s largest protests against anti-Blackness erupted nationally, and before the contemporary sprawl of economic crises, high-stakes elections, and humanitarian horrors abounded. Now, Abloh — who Thug shouted out for sending him clothes on So Much Fun’s “Surf” — is dead of cancer. The Migos are no more after the senseless killing of their impresario, Takeoff, and Young Thug has languished in jail without being convicted of a crime for more than two years. Thug was charged, alongside more than two dozen others, with running a criminal street gang, Young Slime Life, under the guise of his record label, Young Stoner Life. They were indicted under RICO laws designed to take down the Mafia. Thug was billed as the head honcho who pulled the strings behind a bevy of drug sales, robberies, and violence, all the way up to murder.
The case was overzealous and hard to stomach from the start, as the original 88-page indictment rattled off rap lyrics, music videos, and Instagram posts as evidence of their alleged crimes. Opening statements in the trial didn’t even begin until nearly a year and a half later, as the Fulton County court struggled to seat jurors who could give up their lives for the many months it would suck up. In that time, Thug was hit with more charges, repeatedly denied bond, and briefly hospitalized, with his attorney saying he had previously suffered from exhaustion. A co-defendant of his was stabbed in jail, the controversial judge who had presided over the first 18 months in court was recused after Thug’s defense called him out for a “secret meeting” with a witness, and the YSL case has become the longest-running criminal trial in Georgia history. And there’s not a clear end in sight.
Thug’s trajectory from the summer of 2019 to now is just one of the almost unbelievable ways the world has changed radically since then. Simultaneously, we’ve watched our legal system fail elsewhere, like in the Supreme Court’s reversal of federal abortion rights and Congress’ arming of Israel as it assaults Gaza, though international governing bodies have found that nation to be illegally occupying Gaza and “plausibly” committing genocide. We’ve watched more Black people be killed by police with little recourse. And in Atlanta, we’ve watched a once-thriving and communal rap capital cool after the killing and incarceration of two pivotal figures. Young Thug named his second-to-last album before all of this So Much Fun, and in a mere year, things became anything but.
“[There’s] not even a point to the songs,” Thug told No Jumper in an interview ahead of its release. “All of the songs are like turn-up, club, radio, fucking parade music.” The first single, “The London,” with J. Cole and Travis Scott, dropped in late May and soon became Young Thug’s highest-charting song as a lead artist, at Number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. (Today, So Much Fun’s second single, “Hot,” with Gunna, is his highest as the lead.) He had been finding some success in the pop world before then, reaching Number One with a guest verse on Camilla Cabello’s “Havana,” and contributing more hot features with Post Malone and Ed Sheeran, but it was starting to look like Thug could become a pop star himself. Inventive side quests into country trap and meme-able album moments with the tapes Beautiful Thugger Girls and Jeffery helped, too.
Almost immediately, So Much Fun was heralded as an opus by fans and critics alike. “The entire album is animated by an abiding sense that he might do something insane and magical at any given moment,” Danny Schwartz wrote in his review for Rolling Stone. “So Much Fun doesn’t mark a step forward for his aesthetic, but rather an attempt to refine it.” Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre noted the sense of ease with which Thug excelled on it, and the site awarded it its coveted Best New Music distinction. Days after the album dropped on Aug. 16, I was racing around Midtown Atlanta to “Bad Bad Bad” with my boyfriend and his best friend, all of us enamored, the leaves on the trees in the city in the forest becoming a green blur as we flew by them. It was the perfect summer soundtrack.
Thug had assembled a Justice League of trap producers in Southside, Wheezy, Pi’erre Bourne, and others who made the album sing — people who would continue to define and dominate the sound for years after. The sprawling track list could neatly be divided into a few buckets: There’s the gloriously silly stuff like “Surf,” “Light It Up,” and “Mannequin Challenge” with Juice WRLD, where Thug sounds light as ever when he boasts, “The Rolls Royce is gray, I’ve been calling it granny/I copped the Lamb’ truck and that bitch panoramic.” There’s the rock-star stuff; all drugs, girls, clothes, and debauchery with intense but playful production to match.
Then there’s, of course, Cowboy Thugger, who paved the way for Gunna and Lil Baby’s Western-tinged trap with songs like “Just How It Is” and “Circle of Bosses,” with Quavo. And lastly, Thug traverses the spectrum of lover boy to trick to player to pimp on tracks like the Lil-Uzi-Vert-assisted “What’s the Move.” The features had chemistry, the sequencing was spectacular, and it was clear that Thug was, in fact, having the time of his life. He’d later tell Rolling Stone, “If I had a lawn service and I made the money that I got right now, I’d retire. If I had the money that I got right now from any other thing, I’d retire. I got enough money just to chill. I can’t retire from rap music, I like rap too much.”
However, Thug’s knack for rhyming about street enterprise, unflinching violence, and crew love on So Much Fun would come to be used against him. In Fulton County’s indictment, prosecutors name lyrics from the album opener, “Just How It Is,” as “an overt act in furtherance of conspiracy” — they took them literally and as evidence. They cited bars like “I escaped every one of the licks cause I was supposed to be rich/I don’t care nothing ’bout no cop, I’m just tellin’ you how it is”; “Gave the lawyer close to two mil/ He handles all the killings”; and “Hit ’em with the MAC now/Now his whole body scabbed.” They even included one reading that was likely incorrect (and given the way Thug gurgles his words, it’s likely we hear them wrong often): “I done for the crew/I done did the robbin’/I done did the jackin’/Now I’m full rappin’” is likely “I done fucked her crew.”
King Slime, an Ambie-nominated podcast following the case and its origins, noted how other lyrics in the song (“Last nigga tried me almost got popped in Lenox/Ask the cops, ask the detectives, they know all the business”) added friction to a beef with now-incarcerated rapper YFN Lucci that may be connected to the murder of Donovan “Nut” Thomas. Authorities allege Young Slime Life, under Thug, had Thomas killed. There’s been widespread outrage at Thug’s lyrics being entered as evidence in court, usurping creative liberty, setting a dangerous precedent against freedom of expression, and belying the fact that rap is often imaginative and hyperbolic. What’s more, the use of rap lyrics in court has been found to elicit prejudice in ways other genres — whiter genres, like country — do not. If Thug did commit these crimes, the prosecutors should solely rely on concrete evidence to prove it. “Yes he speaks about killing and people being shot and drugs and drive-by shootings,” his lawyer Brian Steel explained as the trial began. “This is the environment that he grew up in. These are the people he knew. These are the stories he knew.”
Young Thug, whose first mixtape series is called I Came From Nothing, was raised in a notoriously gang-riddled housing project in Atlanta and did in fact rep a Blood set, King Slime reports. When Atlanta began to destroy all its housing projects in the mid-Nineties as a crime intervention, it led to a concentration of gang activity around Young Thug’s Cleveland Avenue neighborhood, Volkan Topalli explains on the show. He’s a professor of criminal justice and criminology at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. But by the time the police got Young Thug under RICO laws, he was rich, benevolent, and busy.
After So Much Fun, Thug toured the country with Machine Gun Kelly (“Seemed like he really was having a lot of fun. He wore a red sequins top that made him kinda look like Elton John lol,” wrote a fan in the audience on Reddit.) Thug released a deluxe version of the album with four more songs, dropped another chart-topping album with the rest of his Young Stoner Life label (which included three of his 10 siblings), and watched his protégé Gunna become a superstar in his own right. They both headlined Saturday Night Live in 2021 and 2022, respectively. In 2021, Thug dropped his last album Punk, that included forays into pop rock and a meditative intro, “Die Slow.” There, he recounted the trauma he witnessed as a kid and the poverty he escaped — often not rapping, just talking.
Meanwhile, in Atlanta, the political guard was changing. Fani Willis became the district attorney when former DA Paul Howard Jr. lost his bid for reelection after his mishandling of the police killing of Rashard Brooks in 2020 and the subsequent protests that eventually led to the arson of a Wendy’s. King Slime reports that crime in Atlanta spiked between 2020 and 2022, and Willis blamed it almost exclusively on gangs like the alleged Young Slime Life. When she brought the RICO case against Thug and his co-defendants down, she explained that she had promised Donovan Thomas’ mother she would do everything in her power to get him justice. She found RICO charges particularly useful in unspooling the matrices of crime that she said plague the city. Yet, King Slime also raises skepticism: Willis hit Donald Trump and associates with similar conspiracy charges soon after YSL’s. “It’s not hard to see the YSL trial as a dry run for political circus in court in an election year,” co-host and Rolling Stone contributor George Chidi posited.
In the 841 days since Young Thug’s arrest, both proceedings became circuses, and YSL’s garnered fewer and fewer national headlines. King Slime was canceled, despite essential reporting and contextualization. Jewel Wicker, a freelance culture reporter in and from Atlanta, says, “Covering the trial has definitely been really difficult because the trial coincided with the budget cuts and layoffs within media as a whole. At the start of the trial, I had made agreements with publications to cover its entirety, but that was when we thought that the trial would be a year max.” By the time the trial began last November, they couldn’t afford it. Though local news outlets like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution have followed the case closely, national outlets, like this one, can only do so much for so long. “No media organization is going to agree to cover a trial in its entirety TBD,” Wicker reasons.
Young Thug, too, seems to be fading slowly from public consciousness. Last June, from jail, he released his third album, Business Is Business. It largely came and went, peaking at Number Two but dropping off the chart after 11 weeks. Even the invasion of his privacy when an intimate call with his girlfriend, Mariah the Scientist, was ripped from public records and shared widely online was only a news item briefly. Young Thug was recently photographed in court with his long locs grown out and puffy at the scalp, missing the elaborate retwists he often rocked. He looked tired. When Rolling Stone profiled him for a digital cover in 2021, he bemoaned the isolation and captivity of pandemic quarantine, comparing it to prison. “Prison is the worst thing,” he said then. He’s right.
