Young Thug - Hey I
What enthrals his lovers and frustrates his haters is the relative ease in which Young Thug churns out raps. Some consider his so-laid-back-he-might-fall-over a talent in itself. Others who write rhymes themselves, with the dreams of becoming the next Kendrick Lamar etching lyrics into their Moleskine diaries consider him to be utter rubbish. Basic, a regression, a complete and utter non-sensical fad.
But listen to “Hey I” and you have to admit that while not appealing to the histrionics that our hip-hop purists love, it’s a total jam; a pop song about love laid with the easy breeze of Thug’s malleable flow, over a slick piano led beat.
We’re living in the post-trap world now - one where Trap Queens are analogous to Kate Middleton, where the swiftness of your escape from the bando will ultimately test the foundations of your ghetto love. Fetty Wap’s world wide, audience bending no-need-to-be-explicitely-named track is not just evidence but probably the reason this exists in the mainstream. Tracks like “Hey I” add to this new musical canon of “trap love songs”, a sub genre that would have been sure to have been embedded on that dodgy Limewire downloaded that ruined your laptop if this was ’06.
Young Thug is in love, and the release of this track may or may not have something to do with the announcement of his engagement, as a mere 22 year old. Still feels just as real either way; lines like “Where the fuck you going girl, I miss you, I wanna bang like a pistol, I wanna bang like a crip do” are atypical of a guy of his age, but his delivery - the lack of crispness, the hesitance and crackly tentativeness - serve to show that our bloke is awash with the feels. Pretty bloody easy to imagine him draped on high high thread count duvet, half way through a bottle of the finest red, deep in thought about his bae, but probably only managing to text her some banal shit ‘wubu2’
And that beat…with London The Track, we’ve come to expect the special and the idiosyncratic, whether it’s a Billboard smash or local hype track. It allows Young Thug to be fully exposed; the production isn’t tight or constricting. It’s slick, it’s classic, it’s everything at the minute.
