Phonetic Yeetcraft

Anybody who can parse two consecutive words on the new Young Thug record should pursue a career in speech therapy. Stuffing his mouth with marbles and filtering his vocals through all sorts of distorted Auto-Tune contraptions, the Atlanta hip-hop fixture doesn’t rap so much as speak in tongues. He giggles, murmurs, whimpers, blaaaaah aaaaaahhhhh, yelps (chirp!) and shrieks (swerve!) and sighs (sheesh!), blows raspberries and sputters his lips glehhhhhh, spits on the mic like yeet, grinds his teeth (vroom vroom!); sometimes he’ll break down and cry, and all this he does while pigheadedly refusing to enunciate. Are the speakers working properly? Is somebody strangling a cat over this beat? Nope, Thug’s just on the mic again.

In a typically brilliant July 2014 column, Odyshape’s Michael Tatum compared Thug to early R.E.M., which, as wacky juxtapositions go, hits the nail right on the head: not only are Thug’s lyrics totally incomprehensible, but that’s the whole point, and he makes it signify. Other rappers have incorporated such elements as Auto-Tune and kiddie scream into their delivery, but Thug takes it to the next level — with him, it’s all about the kiddie scream, the electronic blips rippling through vowels and glottal consonants, the saliva hissing in his mouth, the high garbled cadence wailing away in the back of your mind, the range of ridiculous nonsensical noises he can produce with his voicebox. Drooling and moaning and mangling verses that may not even exist in the first place, overdubbing his own vocals with whoops and screeches and other little affirmative exclamations serving as punctuation, sometimes he can sound like a whole group of people crowding around the mic; sometimes he’ll strip to his natural voice, trembling before the listener, lonely and vulnerable. Hearing him rap — a category that includes straight rhyming, goofy-catchy singing, and all the shapeshifting half-melodic mumble in between — can make you gasp and cry. His sheer vocal ingenuity, the way he freely jumps from one declamatory technique to another at will, the way he’s grunting now and he’s speeding up now and now he’s raising his voice as if to ask a question and now he’s howling a line of melody and now he’s mimicking it in another register and now he’s swallowing his words and now he’s snickering at his own handiwork, confounds categories of performed speech with irrepressible, swaggering pleasure.

Like OG Maco, or Kevin Gates, or his close affiliate Rich Homie Quan, Thug is one of those rappers so prolific in the mixtape world he’s become an acknowledged presence despite never having released an official album. Barter 6, available for both purchase and free download from various shady sources, is the latest offering on a large, chaotic pile of free records only available online, and it tops most of them. Unlike his other records, with the exception of 2014’s Black Portland, his sour, sizzling collaboration with fellow Atlanta miscreant Bloody Jay, Barter 6 hangs together with the consistency and careful sequencing of a real album rather than the offhand patchiness of most mixtapes — although competing catalog entries like posse record Birdman Presents Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 and Gucci Mane collaboration Young Thugga Mane La Flare aren’t far behind (both, incidentally, released in 2014 — this man practically lives in the studio). An upcoming official album on the Atlantic label has been announced, which given his mercurial tendencies regarding label-jumping is by no means a certainty (he has in the past slipped through the hands of both 1017 and Cash Money), and he’s scored a number of relatively successful chart singles; check out 2013’s tricky, elusive “Stoner” or especially 2014’s gloriously catchy “Lifestyle.” All of his mixtapes overflow with obscene, inane, addictive entertainment value, even the early stuff where he hasn’t found his style yet. For those looking to familiarize themselves with that outrageous style, however, Barter 6 is a terrific place to start.

For a Young Thug record, Barter 6 moves sneakily. On Black Portland, say, the other Thug record that functions as a visionary artistic whole, Thug and Bloody Jay alternate verses with woozy intensity over scalding beats in the trap/drill mode courtesy of talented but obscure producer DJ Tripp Da HitMajor (heavy rhythmic bass, snare drums and hi-hats rattling against each other and sputtering through triple-time ratatat, layered synthesizer chains snaking through orchestral strings wrapped around minimalist keyboard spirals) to simultaneously hedonistic and ominous effect. While foregrounding Thug’s assorted whines and cries, the music also kicks in with a brash, hooky charge that you can jump around to or play in your car as the case may be, the latter preferably while driving around with the windows down feeling like a badass. On Barter 6, however, Thug recruits established producer London on da Track and rising star Wheezy to compose the musical environment for him, and both have subtler developments in mind. These beats feel quieter and more deconstructed than Thug’s norm, lightly suggestive of possible hooks rather than blaring them in your face. Pale, thin piano figures play over skittering, metallic drums and twirl on their tiptoes; dark, wispy synthesizers shade in the empty spots and provide slippery melodic commentary; ringing bells and rubbery pitched percussive devices raise their heads on occasion; low electronic strings provide steady backup. Far from the flashy crunk vehicle Thug has manufactured in the past, less concerned with club energy than polished smoothness, it all feels too muted, too restrained, hardly the thing to inspire much dancing or any other kind of voluptuary behavior. Yet give Barter 6 two or three listens and I swear the record positively soars, lit up with a poignant, electrifying beauty that, while lifted by the spare, striking beats, inheres primarily in the grain of Thug’s voice.

Constantly in a state of metamorphosis, Thug has multiple voices — I enjoyed “Lifestyle” on the radio for months last year before one day realizing that the two rappers in the chorus, one speaking in what sounds like a normal tone, the other screeching his head off while gargling Auto-Tune fluid, were actually both Young Thug. Whether he’s mumbling passively or whispering through sticky vocal filters or coughing up synthesizer noise, it’s all unified by a plaintive waver in the back of his throat that manifests itself most plainly in the pitch-corrected squeal of his high range. Thus does he convey not just excitement but also fear and simple sadness, especially given the sly, level, open feel of the music. Sometimes he projects romantic melancholy; sometimes his most aggressive brags seem undercut by a ghetto anxiety left inexplicit by Thug where other rappers address it straight up. But always he uses his voice and his propensity for babble as an oddly immediate, intensely eloquent instrument, venting desires and urges and mood swings so pressing that their articulation in sound takes precedence over their articulation in words. For Thug to actually say what he’s feeling would require too much distance, too much forethought. Rather, he sticks to conventional hip-hop themes (sex, guns, substance abuse, wordplay) while letting loose his subconscious, acting on any potential impulse to slur his speech or blubber his lips or jump an octave, and in the process creating a radically new style of sound poetry. Read on the page, the lyrics are pretty pro forma. Pronounced and mispronounced on record, they spew assonance and alliteration and rhyme, twisting themes from the music into their rhythmic phatic phonetic tumble. Combined with the delicate, crackling beats on Barter 6, we have here an astounding rap aesthetic. In its very unintelligibility, it enables a form of shockingly raw expression. Fragile yet powerful, filthy yet exquisite, scary yet delightful, goofy yet deadly serious, shot through with urgent compulsion, Barter 6 flows, glides, and bursts into flame.

Unlike Black Portland or the Gucci Mane collaborations, Barter 6 isn’t exactly party music. But it will swerve, slurp, and sheesh all over you, brrrrrrat bang bang bow (boom!) eeeeeeeeeee aaaaaaah (huh?) eeeee cheeeeee wooooooo (what?) gaaaaah (yaaaaaaaaah!) woaaaaah (sweeeeeeeeeeerve) woaaaaaah ahhhhhhhhhh (yaaaaaaah!) (damn!) (heeeeee) (yaaaaaah) (yeet!) yaaaaaaah (yeet!) yaaaaaaah (yeet!) yeet! It’s an exercise in playful absurdism. It’s a naked mess of preverbal human emotion.