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David Sheffieck: Young Thug became someone I looked forward to hearing after a string of strong features, where his idiosyncratic delivery and stream of consciousness style commanded attention every time he dropped into tracks by artists who couldn’t match his level of weirdness. On his own, there’s not that sense of contrast working in his favor, but this is still plenty strange, plenty exciting. Now he just needs to find a producer who can keep up.
[7]
Anthony Easton: The skittering quality of this and how it speeds up has a paranoid quality that is placed in relief to the more traditional laconic/obsessive quality of the stone vibe. It is a nice anthology of possible reactions good enough to be worth a link on Erowid.
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Alfred Soto: He slurs like a guy who’s high as hell, not Lil Wayne high as hell. Rhymes like one too (what’s his excuse for the “suck my banana” line?). The beat does the stuttering stop-start thing — you know, that content-dictates-form thing.
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Patrick St. Michel: The most exciting thing about Young Thug — and it’s on display here — is how he’s not afraid to twist his voice into all sorts of strange sounds, his signature flow being whatever is on his mind at the time. Here he goes from sing-song cadence to shouty to nasally. Still, “Stoner” is a good-but-not-great backdrop for this, everything a little too slow going but coming off as a secondary concern to Young Thug’s unpredictability.
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Brad Shoup: God, Fabo’s only 30. That’s heartening, I suppose; I remember when I learned how old Mr. Collipark actually was. I’m not about to bet on Young Thug’s longevity — I mean, it’s right there in the name — but if 2016 leaves him behind, it’s because he crammed all his ideas in one song. Check the way he starts his “Versace” flow at the end of the first verse and picks it right up in the second, the quizzical bit about foreign shoes, the way feeling like Fabo starts kinda triumphant and ends in a nap. He’s got voices for days, which I hope isn’t another way of saying a month.
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Megan Harrington: I imagine that listening to Young Thug in 2014 is what it was like to read James Joyce in 1919. It’s brilliant babble that doesn’t cleverly persuade the listener to identify with it through narrative building, and there’s no hope of ever decisively annotating “Stoner.” I’m sensitive to the politics of comparing Young Thug to a Dead White Man, but the upheaval his delivery represents is a moment of modernity that’s rarer and rarer in a culture that regurgitates its culture. This is a song with no practical application, no immediate mood, no hook — that Thug is now an influential artist on the cusp of a label deal is an exciting slug to the mainstream, the promise of a future you can’t imagine.
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Mallory O’Donnell: Like a bodega sandwich, the less you know about what you’re ingesting the better. Luckily only seven people on the earth have any clue what Young Thug is on about.
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