Slime Season

As of October 31st, Jeffery Lamar Williams, Jr., the rapper known as Young Thug, is free. Or at least, he is free in a technical sense. Thug accepted a plea deal of forty years: five years in prison (later commuted to time served), fifteen years of probation and twenty years in prison if his probation is violated. It ended the highly publicized, often strange trial of the rapper and a plethora of his associates in YSL on RICO charges. Young Stoner Life (YSL) is Thug’s record label, but the prosecutor—Fani Willis, who has also leveled RICO charges at Donald Trump and his camp after their attempt to overturn the 2020 election—alleged that YSL also stands for Young Slime Life, a “criminal street gang” led by Williams.

With 56 charges and 27 defendants in addition to Thug, Willis’s indictment painted a portrait of a vast criminal conspiracy involving murder, racketeering, armed robbery and drug dealing—all overseen by Thug himself, who, the prosecution charged, led a regional chapter of the Bloods street gang that “moved like a pack” and terrorized the city of Atlanta. For fans who know Thug as a wildly inventive, charismatic, genre- and gender-bending artist, the charges seemed pulled out of a playbook as fantastic as Thug’s lyrical universe itself. Is this the same man who, 6 foot 3 with a 26-inch waist, poses delicately in a lavender-colored couture dress on the cover of his self-titled album Jeffery, rapping about buying a “family pack of Jimmy Choos”?

To understand how we got here, let’s examine Young Thug. Williams would be my, and many others’, pick for the defining rapper of the 2010s, a melodic genius with a vocal dynamism rarely before seen in hip-hop. Ad-libs, melodies, mid-line rhythmic changeups are everywhere, and while his lyrics draw from the traditional palette of rap themes, these subjects work less as narrative anchors and more as raw materials from which to build a psychedelic universe of his own invention. As one of his early producers revealed, Thug never wrote down his lyrics; he would show up to the studio with a notepad with drawings in it. In an interview with fashion magazine Highsnobiety, he explained:

I might draw a head with, like, Goku hair, and then I might start with the left side of his ear and go to the right side of his ear and the way I do his hair, those are my rhythms. So, if I draw his hair and it’s like porcupines going all up and down then when I started rapping I’m going to rap with that melody.

This approach, along with his play with rhythm and vocality, allows him to transform stock phrases into surreal and almost abstract images. Familiar hip-hop metonyms morph into acid trips (“Diamonds water like I bought ’em from a squid”), boasts are tweaked toward childlike whimsy (“Money long like a sock with some shorts”) and the sexually explicit shades into self-reflexive, almost modernist koans (“I don’t speak English / I fuck that mouth, on the secret”). On his website The Book of Thug, Aditya Nirvaan Ranganathan compares Thug to Dylan and Jim Morrison; when Ranganathan played Thug’s music for his grandmother, she recognized similarities to Indian raga.

Given all this, it was not just the charges levied against Williams that were surprising. Willis’s argument hinged on the claim that Thug’s lyrics directly described criminal activity, and Judge Ural Glanville allowed them to be read out as evidence in court. This led to a spectacle even more surreal than Thug’s music itself. Picture the judge, reading out “Slime Shit” word by word as if it’s a criminal manifesto (“Drinkin’ Actavis, hey / On that snail shit, hey … This that slime shit, this that mob shit … Fuck the judge, YSL”), his comically neutral affect occasionally interrupted when he trips over the flow.

Young Thug’s lawyer, Brian Steel, countered the prosecution’s use of lyrics by himself entering one of Thug’s videos into the record. “Lifestyle” is one of Thug’s most straightforwardly catchy songs, and the spectacle of the courtroom listening in polite silence to the entire song as the strangely loud bass wobbles the blown-out courtroom speakers is surreal. As Thug sing-raps about success in an almost indecipherable falsetto wail (“I’m on the top of the mountain puffin’ on clouds…”), the court videographer tracks slowly across the lawyers and defendants, everyone dressed in suits. Doug Weinstein, Yak Gotti’s lawyer, almost imperceptibly bops his head; when we get to Thug, we see just the faintest hint of a smile.

Steel told the judge that the purpose of entering the video was to show that while other performers in the video wear red (a color associated with the Bloods), Thug does not; and also that the words “rich gang” refer not to being rich and in a gang, but to the name of one of Thug’s musical side projects. The tactic also slyly indicates the appeal of Young Thug as a musician, his inscrutability to those not in the know, and the complexity of his music, which goes far beyond the straightforward depiction of illegal activity that the prosecution was arguing.

Steel gained the upper hand when his motion to recuse Glanville was approved after multiple defendants filed complaints against him for holding “improper meetings” with a witness for the prosecution. The new judge, Paige Reese Whitaker, admonished Chief Deputy District Attorney Adriane Love for mishandling a witness, and was far less accepting of the prosecution’s strung-together narrative and sloppy legal procedure, commenting, “I truly am struggling with whether all of this is purposeful or this is just really poor lawyering on the part of members of the state’s team.” One month later, Young Thug took the plea recommended by the judge.

In the most immediate aftermath, Thug is banned from Atlanta for ten years (except for special events and community service), and from making “gang-related” music or interacting with known associates besides Gunna, his longtime YSL signee who took an Alford plea, and his own brother, Quantavious Grier. These conditions remain the most amusing effect of the trial. He cannot reference YSL in almost any way, nor can he use the snake emoji or say “slatt” or “slime”—words that he singlehandedly popularized. While the state claimed these words are gang codes, in his music they work as floating signifiers, their meaning spreading out virally. The gesture associated with “slatt”—wiping of one’s nose—has become ubiquitous (see: Tyreek Hill doing the sign after a touchdown and saying “FREE SLATT,” referencing Young Thug himself), lending weight to the defense’s argument that these symbols are not about gang signaling. Meanwhile, the state seems to assume these nebulous terms will cause some sort of sleeper activation in his affiliates. Even after gaining his conditional release, Thug has to abide by a very arbitrary application of self-censorship, punished as much for his lyrical inventiveness as for his potential proximity to criminal elements.

I wouldn’t pretend that Willis’s inability to convict Thug and Trump is connected, but there is something funny about the fact that she put far more effort into prosecuting a famous rapper than the prospective president of the United States. Even disregarding the levers in place to disincentivize prosecuting someone who gains that much power—Trump’s numerous indictments and charges looking more and more precarious—the disparity is revealing. For now, we can hope Thug is well, smiling and that his First Day Out is fire.