JEFFERY Marks a Turning Point in Young Thug’s Career, But How Much Is Going to Change?

It’s been a little more than a week since Young Thug released his follow-up to March’s Slime Season 3, which functioned as both the final installment in the Slime Season trilogy and, what was then-assumed to be, the last of Thug’s mixtapes before his studio debut, Hy!£UN35.

Instead, we got JEFFERY, a lean, mean, hit machine that some critics are already calling Thug’s best work. However, this piece isn’t necessarily about the quality of the music itself — I’ve been digesting this album for the last week and I’m still not totally sure I know how I feel about it — but rather what this collection of songs represents in the context of Young Thug’s career; where he’s been, where he is now, and where he’s going.

The most striking aspect of this project is how clearly thought-out its construction is in comparison to previous Young Thug releases. One of the most exciting things about Thug’s music is its unpredictability; this notion that maybe the artist himself has no idea how much of an impact he’s having on the industry at large.

However, on JEFFERY, each track seems to exist with the intention of showcasing one of Thug’s many talents. Songs like “RiRi” and “Harambe” are dedicated to experimenting with new vocal inflections (*Slime Season 3 had Thug trying his hand at screaming some of his vocals, while JEFFERY stretches that concept to its fullest potential, with Thug actually letting his voice crack during some of his melodies’ higher notes), while others like “Kanye West” and “Wyclef Jean” have the rapper doing everything in his power to be taken seriously as a real artist — one with mainstream appeal.

And that’s the key to this whole thing. Between his guest verse on Usher’s “No Limit,” the JEFFERY promo video that was released a few days before the album, and the possibility of a permanent name change (he was quoted as saying, “I ain’t want my kids to grow up and call me Thug.”), it seems like the rapper is finally making that transition into the mainstream that his most die-hard fans anticipated and feared in equal measures. Whether we want to accept it or not, both Thug and his music are changing at a rate with which his fans may not be able to keep up.

In 2016 alone, he went from releasing the good-but-not-great mixtape I’m Up to dishing out back-to-back masterpieces Slime Season 3 and JEFFERY like it was nothing. Looking back on how all of this panned out, it’s interesting to think of Thug’s career thus far as a kind of blank slate, one where he knew the artist he wanted to be way back in 2011, and dedicated the last five years to mastering all of the skills necessary to make that transition comfortably.

His approach to this concept has resulted in one of the most fascinating rap careers in the history of the genre, and while a certain part of me is fearful of Thug’s future as a pop artist, it’s gratifying to know that sometimes a surplus of talent truly is the key to making it in this business. All of this — the incredible output, the experimentation, the refusal to adhere to socially acceptable constructs of gender and musicality — was leading to the moment that Young Thug would become an artist you’d regularly hear on the radio or on the latest Top 40 list; because if anyone deserves to be there, it’s him.