10. Young ThugBarter 6
‘Hey, I’ and ‘Raw’ from Slime Season 2 are, for my taste, the best Young Thug songs to date. However, Barter 6 is the most album-like thing the man has done to date – it’s somehow so cohesive and lush and cloudy and punchy and beautiful. Plus his voice on this record was such a breakthrough. I know every single word and twist and turn of his melodies – in some ways, this record is quite close to the Joni Mitchell record above. Just on the level of the vocal free-play, like when he does a run. It’s way more like a dance or sport approach to singing, like Young Thug will do a vocal run, but then he’ll say after a run: "That’s how you do it." So that’s how you do what? What are you talking about? You just do an Auto-Tuned, gargled run, but he feels like he’s just stuffed the landing. You can hear that in Joni Mitchell, too – on a live recording she’ll go for a run and then miss a note and then laugh. It’s like she didn’t know what she was doing, she was just going for it. There’s a real idiosyncratic freedom of the approach to vocalisation.
