Fire Gender Benders
Young Thug, Elton John + Little Richard
Young Thug is an undeniably unique artist who has risen from local Atlanta phenom to top-charting pop star in the past decade. Part of Thug’s core appeal has always been how ahead of the curve he always seems to be. Even today, there is something one needs to get, a complex network of sociocultural referents that one must be attuned to, to really appreciate Young Thug’s music and persona. However, even before being comprehended, Young Thug’s role as a contemporary rock star seems fitting if not necessary.
Rock stars and sex icons are what they are because of this push-and-pull between being unknowable while emanating something that makes people want to know more and more about them. From Janis Joplin to Little Richard, Grace Jones to Elton John, they push their sound, appearance, and notions of sexuality to places unexplored by the majority of people, enticing, confusing, and even frustrating or aggravating audiences while cementing themselves as vital producers of culture. That tension between love and hate is the frontier of the Rockstar, and it is where Young Thug thrives.
In 2015, the Guardian had already naturalized referring to Young Thug earnestly as a surrealist artist, for multiple reasons. On top of the tattoos, piercings, and hair dyes that can all be read as embodied rejections of the current world (or, indeed, corporeality itself), he often moves well beyond the reach of conventional language use, coming with songs easily dismissed by the less patient or open-minded as mumble rap. His enunciations are neither singing nor rapping, and he stretches the possibilities of voice in the broadly-defined region of music that he resides in. That surrealism is sexy and iconic because it makes apparent to people a new way of being a person, of being in the world.
Young Thug embraces and utilizes elusiveness. He tries to change his name to No, My Name is Jeffery, and then simply to SEX, for no reason other than:
Cause I think I’m SEXY… and it’s short for sexy https://t.co/npjnxlpU2B
— Young Thug ひ (@youngthug) July 6, 2018
He wears dresses on album covers and DAZED photoshoots while referring to his close friends as hubby and being publicly pressed for allegedly planning a hit on his idol. Thugger puts forth an incomprehensibility that dares you to try and comprehend it, crafting a surrealist opacity. Yet there is a light shining through and bouncing off of that mystery, like the diamonds on his wrist and in his face. An indicator of the fact that tension, opposites pulling at each other, is one of the most honestly real things that can be. And for a person to be able to exist as a pure representation of that idea is what makes Young Thug so alluring, earning him the rock star title.
