Last week, a video surfaced of Young Thug berating two black female airline workers for not allowing him to board a flight he was late for. In the footage, he calls the women “bum ass hoes”, “ants” and “peasants”. As they turn their backs to the camera he chuckles, informing the viewer that their hair is “nappy as a motherfucker” and that they looked like “Africans” that had “been deported”. Later on, he clarified in a tweet that his comments hadn’t been an indictment on all black women, rather just those “two black, burnt” ones.  The backlash was swift and incongruously culminated in a brief interview with Paper on 12 December in which he spoke about “the fight against poverty”. But amid the anger was an overriding sense of disappointment. It was as if it was a surprise to find Young Thug reverting to the egotistical, misogynistic braggadocio present in his entire discography.  For some time now, Young Thug has been posited as the poster child for progression within rap. His “carefree black boy” aesthetic made him a fashion-world darling and a mascot for an emerging wave of renaissance rappers. Gushing profiles rattled on about his services to patriarchy-smashing, with little mention of anything else besides his outfits. It’s troubling how the bar is set so low that he has been lauded for changing rap without really changing anything other than his clothes.  It’s as if critics couldn’t hear the tired misogyny and hypermasculinity in his music over the sound of their own applause for his breaking of barriers. “I got 50 foreign hoes on my dick / I’m a nut in all ’em hoes”, “She ain’t gettin’ shit unless she suckin’ dick”, “She suck on that dick on the plane/ And I just called her airhead” among other equally demeaning lines, come from a man apparently changing the game for the better.  In a recent Calvin Klein campaign, the rapper made much-celebrated comments denouncing gender: “In my world, of course, it doesn’t matter. You could be a gangster with a dress, you could be a gangster with baggy pants,” he mused. “I feel like there’s no such thing as gender.” In similarly open-minded moves, he wore a pretty periwinkle gown on the cover of his Jeffery mixtape and modelled a piece from the Calvin Klein women’s collection in a polarising ad. The very same gender he claims not to buy into was swiftly weaponised, though, when he began referring to women as “hoes”. Gender also matters when, in his music, women only exist on bended knee and voiceless.  This isn’t an attempt to undermine the effect his outfit choices have had on the scene. He’s received his fair share of stick for how he dresses and has been a victim of homophobia from the public and his peers. His attire may be a pushback against the toxic masculinity often present in the genre, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t just as toxic. Painfully, the very black women he denigrates have been those continually championing his flamboyance. And though we are by now used to raising glasses in clubs to songs about how little we mean to the men whose pockets we continually line, his denigration stings far more than others. The disappointment lies in the fact that he was billed as an eccentric, effeminate exception from the usual woman-bashers. The problem is, he never really was.  Heralded as the new face of more inclusive rap, he is merely the old face in fancy new clothes. He said it himself: “You can still be a gangster in a dress”. A costume change is easier than a change of content. Patriarchal strictures stay entirely unchallenged, women remain nothing more than canvases for cum shots. But hey, the new dress code is fabulous.
Dress-wearing, Ugg boot-rocking rapper Young Thug is an artist well known for defying gender expectations. His latest curveball? That he’s woefully predictable