Hey I'm Brian Hyatt. This is Rolling Stone Music Now. I have Whitney Jeffy Haza and we're going to talk about Young Thug. Young Thug has a new album out called Punk. Jeff also got to spend some time with

Young Thug in Atlanta for a Rolling Stone digital cover story. That was really

great. You should check that out.

It seemed like a good time to kind of look back at young Thug's career, talk about this new album, talk about

Jeff's experience there. I mean, but let's take a step back and this is one of the most interesting careers, not just in hip hop over the last decade, but in, you know, pop music across the board.

Take us back to kind of the start

and maybe take us through some of his evolution.

Thug is someone who kind of emerged,

not seemingly out of nowhere, but he emerged in this way that it wasn't as though he belonged to some sort of lineage you know and I think in hip-hop you usually have stars come through other stars right where like, oh, like you're kind of associated

with this thing going on, and then now you kind of pop off.

But Thuggett was like the introduction of just like a completely new species

into the game.

You know, and this must have been around what 2013, 2012, 2011 when

1017 Thug came out and you know that's where we get the introduction of this like really

really crazy vocal register right in this like very like dynamic way of

delivering both you know R&B type singing and and really really crazy word play when you really think about it and like

dig into like the stuff he's saying and I think it didn't take long for him to really really

establish himself as like the only one doing what he was doing.

And a lot of that, early on, a lot of that was this sort of rather than wordplay, almost

sound play, this almost abstract kind of thing

he would do with sounds and words and stretching.

And people have expended a lot of words of music criticism

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