Young Thug : Came from Nothing

2016-05-15T09:59:00Z

In the spare bedroom of a small brick house in East Point, Atlanta, the 22-year-old rapper Young Thug is crouched in a cramped, wooden closet, ad-libbing into a microphone strung from the wall. Darting between warbling melodies and quick, halting yawps, his voice rings out through the other rooms of the house and even faintly onto the sidewalk outside, where it's cold and the lawn is newly covered in brown and yellow leaves. It's early December, and all along the street are cinder-block strip malls with Christmas lights and locked grates over the doors and windows, most of them shuttered for the night.
This house is only now coming alive. It belongs to another rapper, Peewee Longway, who at the moment is leaning against the closet door, gripping a stack of $20 bills and nodding to the beat, his camouflage cargo pants bulging with pharmaceutical prescription bottles. The room is a dark, olive green, with a stained carpet and shelves cluttered with crumpled packs of Newports. Getting impatient, Peewee grits his gold teeth and knocks on the closet door, shouting, “Aye, let me get a hit.” The door slides open, releasing a dense mass of weed smoke that floods the room, and out of the makeshift booth steps Thug, shirtless and lanky in a pair of tight leather pants with gold zippers. Thug : this is what he is called by even his closest friends, though his immediate family may slip and call him Jeffrey or Lil' Jeff (he was born Jeffrey Williams). He looks around and blinks, bewildered, as though for a moment he'd forgotten he wasn't alone in the room, before passing Peewee what's left of his blunt.
Thug rubs his eyes and shakes out his dreads, and even barefoot, he's a full head taller than Peewee, who is stout and lives up to his nickname. The two shot a music video here not long ago for their song “Loaded,” and have known each other for as long as they can remember, having grown up four doors down in the same housing project—but then the same can be said for most of the people Thug works with regularly. “This our city,” he says, “so we always known each other.” From Peewee, the blunt circles the room : to Jose Guapo, short and wiry and too excitable to stay seated for long ; to Rich the Kid, cool and reserved and conspicuously well-dressed ; to the night's engineer, Y.D.G., who sits at the computer desk in a black hoodie, a pistol perched casually in his lap as he cuts and rearranges sections of the verse Thug has just finished recording. On the floor next to the computer sits a single Styrofoam cup filled with bright pink liquid that quivers with every jolt of bass.

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Young Thug : Came from Nothing