Planet Thugger

This story is taken from the Freedom issue of LOVE magazine. Order a copy here.

There are certain figures who don’t just emerge within culture—they rupture it. Young Thug is one of them. Not shaped by genre, his work doesn’t operate as a discography; it functions as a living ecosystem. He creates music from fragmentation itself, weaving together feeling, repetition, and broken forms into something coherent yet ever shifting. Young Thug embodies cultural reassembly in real time, dismantling established categories and rebuilding them into fluid, transformative structures.

His influence is not just musical, it’s infrastructural. He didn’t just change what music sounds like—he changed how it communicates. Thug is one of the most influential artists of our time, and one of the few figures whose presence altered the texture of culture itself. His sensibility—idiosyncratic, committed, and ever-shifting—has become a cultural logic. He doesn’t follow the momentum, he produces it.

Born Jeffery Lamar Williams II in Atlanta, Young Thug was the tenth child in a family of eleven, raised in the Jonesboro South projects near Cleveland Avenue. These housing developments, among Georgia's most dangerous, shaped his world until he left at seventeen. When Young Thug was nine, he watched one of his older brothers was shot and killed outside their home. The projects that shaped his childhood were eventually demolished entirely. “There is nothing there now, just grass,” he once said. “We stayed until they closed it and started knocking down the buildings on the last day.”

Though his world transformed around him, family stayed constant. He is, first and foremost, a son, brother, and father. Thug often acknowledges his mother publicly, known as Big Duck. “It’s always been ‘us,’ never been a ‘me’ or a ‘you.’ I always had to share… it just made me embrace it even more… My mom got eleven kids.” Speaking of sharing, the meaning is quite literal: when he was twelve, his feet were so small he would wear his sister’s glitter shoes to school—a move that has stayed with him throughout and has influenced his style. “When it comes to swag, there’s no gender involved,” he adds.

The very first Young Thug song dates back to 2011. It’s a feature with Cashout, “I Got It.” This was before his name even fully landed; he first wrote under Yung and later settled for Young. This was when Cashout was relatively big, but Thug was still able to outshine him on it, before he’d even dropped any real music himself.

Approximately a year after the single, Thug self-released his first mixtape, I Came From Nothing. It dropped as a series: the first volume came out in June 2011, Vol. 2 in December 2011, and Vol. 3 in July 2012. On Vol. 1, his sound was not yet fully developed, and the mixtape sounded more like a tribute to Lil Wayne—in the best way possible. Thug repeatedly acknowledged Wayne as a foundational influence and a central inspiration in his career, describing him as, “Always my idol, he’s still my idol,” emphasizing that he always paid close attention to everything Wayne released. “When he came in as a Hot Boy, he was a street n****… But as he grew, he had tight clothes, rockstar… So I guess I went the same path, because I always paid attention to him.” In short, Thug’s relationship to Wayne isn’t just admiration—it’s lineage and legacy. Wayne set the template, Thug re-engineered the system. By the third volume, I Came From Nothing, Vol. 3 (2012), Thug started to sound like Thug. It is also the first time we hear him collaborate with Future, who at the time had not yet released a studio album himself.

During that era, Gucci Mane was running the music industry in Atlanta, both as a rapper and under his label, 1017 Records. Through Peewee Longway, who was already signed with Gucci, Thug entered the chat in 2013. Story goes, he had so much trust in Longway's opinion, he offered Thug a $25,000 deal before ever hearing any of his music. Gucci later said, “I didn't even know what I had with Thug, but a week later, I realized he is a star.”

Two months after getting signed, 1017 Thug dropped. The album did not sound like anything else out there. It was clear that Thug had no intention of fitting into any fixed genre. “I don’t care if my music’s perfect, I care if it feels perfect,” he once said. This emphasis on feeling over precision remains central to his art. To listen to a song like “Pichaco” feels like being inside a cartoon hallucination. Thug redefined what rap sounds like; his voice doesn’t follow the beat so much as bend around it, collapsing words into sounds and sounds into mood. It wasn’t about meaning. It was about affect. The mixtape didn’t just mark an entry—it signaled an artistic disruption.

Thug’s voice, full of leaps and wails, sometimes feels like architecture built from chaos. There is no formal training, only momentum.

Language in Thug’s world is also just another sonic texture—reassembled, abstracted, disfigured until it becomes emotive matter. “I never write. Never! I do not even remember if I can write.” He builds each song through vocal layering, instinctive freestyling, and post-recording reconstruction. Sound engineers have described sessions where Thug will record dozens of versions of a single phrase, then make choices later based on tone alone, rather than meaning.

What followed was not a slow progression but a sequence of breaks. Over roughly a year and a half, he released around seven more mixtapes: Black Portland, 1017 Thug 2, and 1017 Thug 3. His first real commercial breakout came with “Stoner” in 2014, followed by “Danny Glover” and a feature on Rich Gang's “Lifestyle.” The latter became one of Atlanta's biggest songs of that era, even though the initial hatred was real. Simply put, Thug was just ahead of his time. Today, the “Lifestyle” music video has nearly seven hundred million views on YouTube and over three hundred million streams on Spotify.

Between 2015 and 2016, there was Slime Season, which can be perceived as mythology through output. He wasn’t refining a sound—he was multiplying it. All leading to the mixtape Jeffrey in 2016 and “Harambe,” where he completely abandoned conventional rap flows, producing music that resembled a broken Louis Armstrong trumpet more than anything recognizable as trap. On Jeffrey, no two tracks were built in the same dimension. The vocal choices—pitched up, stretched out, whispered, screamed—were more extreme than ever. But nothing felt gratuitous. Every shift in tone served sensation over all else, with Thug's musical genius on full display.

What also came out of Jeffery was his fashion influence, built on subverting roles. Thug appeared on the cover in his infamous purple skirt, a bold move that sparked a wider controversy over expectations of how rap artists should dress. But for Thug, it was just a fashion choice. “In my world you can be a gangster with a dress or you can be a gangster in baggy pants. I feel like there is no such thing as gender.” The skirt made fashion history, later appearing on view in the Gender Bending Fashion exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

As his style evolved, Young Thug began to expand his brand universe. In 2016, he announced the launch of YSL Records (Young Stoner Life), under the aegis of 300 Entertainment. This transition represented more than just a label change, it signaled a strategic shift in creative autonomy and cultural positioning. He signed Gunna, Lil Keed, Yak Gotti, even his sisters Dolly White and HiDoraah, reaffirming that family is still central to his world-building.

Now in control of his own publishing apparatus, in 2018 he released a compilation album, Slime Language, under YSL Records—a compilation that functioned as a collective statement that placed his affiliates on the map and cemented his own position not just as an artist, but as a cultural architect and curator.

On his twenty-eighth birthday, he dropped his first studio album So Much Fun (2019). His biggest project yet, the album was carried by singles like “Hot” and “The London.” The project was louder, cleaner, more palatable to a wider audience, yet remained unmistakably his own. It also charted as a No. 1 album on Billboard 200, his first big hit to date. When his second studio album, Punk (2021), followed two years later, Thug found himself back on top again.

The state’s legal approach was nothing new, but it's a strategy that remains wildly uneven in practice.. Rap lyrics are still routinely interpreted as fact—where other genres are read as fiction. The Columbia University Black Pre-Law Society published a statement: “The case of Young Thug demonstrates how the law operates not just as a tool for justice but as an interpreter of free speech, one that is often biased against Afro-American art and artists.” The prosecution wasn't seeking justice at all—it was weaponizing artistic expression. “You couldn’t build a jail high enough for the lyrics I’ve said on songs, which are all untrue,” Thug once said in an earlier interview, years before the charges.

Soon after Thug’s highly publicized legal drama, the state of California signed Assembly Bill 2799—the Decriminalizing Artistic Expression Act—into law. The policy limited the admissibility of creative work as criminal evidence unless it directly relates to a specific crime. The new legislation was supported by Jay-Z, Fat Joe, Killer Mike, Meek Mill, and others who signed a formal letter of support.

For Thug, the bill arrived too late. In December 2024, he accepted a plea deal, forty years in total, with five years credited to time already served, fifteen on probation, and twenty suspended under strict conditions. The sentence avoided trial but left him under long-term state supervision.

While in prison, Thug began work on his latest album, Uy Scuti, named after the largest known star in the observable universe. Reportedly, recording sessions involved thirty to forty vocal takes per track, assembled through improvisation, and no written lyrics. Tracks were produced in temporary studios across Georgia and Florida. Engineers who’ve worked on the album describe it as"ambient, guttural, and spatially hollow." The album is still in the works as of now, but hopefully Uy Scuti will be No. 1 on every chart by publication.

After all, Thug doesn’t sit at the center of culture—he bends it toward himself. His influence is gravitational. Across music, and fashion, his presence circulates in fragments; artists imitate him unconsciously. His phrasing, his rhythm, his posture—all of it leaks into the structure of how things now look, sound, or feel..

He moves with a kind of casual precision—self-aware, abstract, funny. “I don’t think I’m as cool as people think I am. I think I’m funny,” he once said. Not an overcorrection, nor a performance. Just an observation. He often gestures towards his own visibility only to pull back from it; he remains a figure both hyper-recognizable and hard to define.

For the level of fame, he persona remains oddly relatable. Not because he’s accessible, but because he never bothers to translate. His likability cuts through. He is absurd, aspirational, and at times disarmingly sincere. The charm isn’t constructed—it’s embedded. One of the most imitated and referenced figures in contemporary culture, he has reshaped not just what rap sounds like—but how artists move, speak, and exist. He doesn’t perform relevance. He makes it. “I feel like I started a lot of things,” he once said. “But I don’t try to downplay nobody’s career. I ain’t make their career. I just made a lot of people not be scared to be them.”

Amen.

Makeup MJ DELMORAL, Hair LYNN JADOTTE, Photography Assistant OSCAR SANABRIA, Digitech JAVIER SANCHEZ, Fashion Assistants HARRISON THOMAS and EMMA ZIENOWICZ, Production ECLECTIC MEDIA