Young Thug is not into literalism. He thrives in gray areas, animated by the electricity generated by the tension of his own contradictions, and he never, ever offers a straightforward explanation.
Look how he handled the most surreal rap beef of 2015 in a recent Instagram message to Lil Wayne. “This is my idol. I won’t ever in my life swap words with him,” Thug pledged—days away from releasing his imminent debut album,Carter 6, a title hijacked from Wayne, whose own Carter V languished in Cash Money purgatory. But then, in closing: “Ha haaa,” punctuated with a trollish tongue wag. Like most everything Thugger has done in the last year and a half, it made people confused: What kind of god-level shade was this? Is he taking any of this remotely seriously? And what in fuck’s sake is his endgame with this album, the name of which changed days before its release to Barter 6 after Wayne threatened to sue? Barter 6 was already the year’s most controversial rap album—or “retail mixtape,” as if the distinction really matters—before it even dropped.
But Barter 6 has almost nothing to do with Lil Wayne, save its provocative title (which I’m saying is more Treachery of Images than aimless troll, anyway) and a handful of scattered lyrical shots. Idol or not, Thug hasn’t directly emulated Wayne since his debut tape, 2011’s I Came From Nothing. But he’s always seemed to delight in playful misdirection, quietly reveling in the chaos provoked by his mere existence, from the vaguely gender-bending fashions to the pet names for his friends. Thug seems to recognize the power of his own mystique, headline-grabbing yet somehow unknowable: “Every time I dress myself, I go muhfucking viral,” he crows, bemused, on “Halftime”. And on Barter 6, Thug yet again dodges any easy narrative. Far from a public idol-killing, or zany sideshow, it’s composed, patient, even subtle—an album neither fans nor detractors saw coming.
Over the course of his three-part I Came From Nothing tape series, Thug’s now-singular voice took shape. The projects often felt like extended stylistic experiments, ranging wildly in quality—but when inspiration struck, it sounded like nothing else coming out of his Atlanta hometown, from guileless outsider-pop ballads to completely unclassifiable vocal performance clinics. By 2013’s 1017 Thug, Thug’s “weirdness” had become an easy hook, a rapper who sang and hollered odes to lean and compared his jewelry to Pokémon. Early 2014 singles “Stoner” and “Danny Glover” plopped Thug on the threshold of the mainstream, and Rich Gang, the Birdman-conceived duo of Thug and kindred spirit Rich Homie Quan, spawned the radiant single “Lifestyle”.
There is no “Lifestyle” on Barter 6, nor is it particularly “weird.”Opening track “Constantly Hating” unfurls gently, its impressionistic Wheezy beat leaving space between bass tremors for Thug to explore. There are hardly any big-name collaborators here: “Can’t Tell”, with its T.I. and Boosie appearances, is the least integral track, despite its star power. Itreflects none of the clamor of Thugger’s dramatic 2015. Instead, Barter 6 argues that his greatest asset all along was not his wackiness, his “outsider” status, or his surprising inner hitmaker—it’s not even his voice, or at least, not entirely. It’s Thug’s uncanny and singular way of piecing a song together, a skill he has doubled down on with this release: a way with vocal technique, melody, and detail-oriented composition that makes the bizarre seem approachable and the familiar feel new.
He plies those compositional talents here to the cohesive rap album, a format Thug had shown very little prior indication he was interested in at all. He treats the smallest compositional details with the care and craftsmanship of a chorus—everything here is a hook, from the ad-libs (a term that feels insufficient—Thug’s “ad-libs” are fully integrated into the song’s structure, to the point where we should probably just call them backing vocals) to the individual bars to the empty spaces. Barter 6 is not a world-conquering album; instead, it digs tunnels.
More than anything, Barter 6 feels like a 50-minute performance of what rap, as a form, can do: rap that need not transcend itself, towards High Art on one hand or commercial art on the other, in order to succeed in 2015. Thug’s rapping itself, known for its unpredictability, is sharper than ever; his voice feels clarified, strengthened. Take “Halftime”, the most thrilling technical display here, on which Thug seamlessly snaps into a dozen different flows: casually extending the second syllable of “re-cy-cles” so that it threatens to throw the song off track entirely, pausing a beat, unleashing a quick guffaw, snapping back on beat. It’s an almost-reckless balance-beam routine. He pauses only for an ingenious vocoder breakdown that melts his cries of “Havin’ the time of my muhfuckin’ liiiiiife” into semiotic ooze, suddenly giving the blood-red backdrop of the cover art an almost Lynchian cast, like the velveteen Black Lodge interior.
Every element exists for a reason, fitting like puzzle pieces into place over multiple listens: even the guest spots from presumable weed carriers like Duke (formerly MPA) and Yak Gotti put in work. Haunting, virtuosic final act “Just Might Be” gives Thug’s moments of silence the primacy of a hook: “That’s called breathing, that’s how you let that bitch breathe,” he sighs after a verse of rapid-fire double-time, leading into a cathartic exhale that spans a full eight bars. This is the anti-“Let the Beat Build”, on an album that’s the anti-Carter III.
And as for Thug’s widely-touted unintelligibility, Barter 6 argues that all we need to do is listen a bit more carefully: what may not be legible at first glance reveals itself patiently over time. In this sense, you are doing it wrong by asking Young Thug his thoughts on Ferguson point-blank, as one reporter did last fall. Thug bristled then, responding with what looked like apathy. But there is no ambiguity on “OD” when he cries, “RIP Mike Brown, fuck the cops” (nor was there, for that matter, on his gut-wrenching 2013 Trayvon Martin tribute). He will speak when he’s ready, and on his own terms: abstracted, maybe, but ultimately loud and clear.