You don’t get a lot of warning for an artist like Young Thug. From his warped delivery to his radical, gender-fluid fashion sense, the Atlanta rapper (born Jeffery Lamar Williams in 1991) flies in the face of every unspoken rule for what hip-hop is, should, and could be. Starting with a prolific run of mixtapes in the early 2010s, Thug rose by pioneering a weird, ever-shifting flow somewhere between singing, rapping, mumbling and squawking—pushing rap forward by pulling it apart. But the weirdest thing about what he does is that it works: Nearly every project Thug’s released since 2015—from the reggae-inflected JEFFREY to the country-ish sides of Beautiful Thugger Girls—has cracked the mainstream, laying the groundwork for a new crop of fellow eccentrics like Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. In other words, Thug hasn’t adjusted to convention but brought convention to him. Genuinely experimental, he frames his process in modest terms: “I’m in the studio so much, I’ll just try stuff,” he told The FADER in 2013. “I just think and try, think and try.”
JACKBOYS is a compilation album by JackBoys (American record label, Cactus Jack Records) and American rapper Travis Scott (the leader). JackBoys is a collective and group of American rappers signed to Scott’s Cactus Jack Records, which is made up of Scott himself, Sheck Wes, Don Toliver, Luxury Tax, and Scott’s DJ Chase B. The album was released on December 27, 2019. It features guest appearances from Rosalía, Lil Baby, Quavo and Offset from the hip hop trio Migos, Young Thug, and Pop Smoke. Upon debut, JackBoys opened atop the US Billboard 200 on January 11, 2020, becoming the first number one album of the 2020s. This is Scott’s third album to debut atop the chart since his third studio album, Astroworld (2018).
