Review Summary: As it stands, he may be too much of a character to hate, but Young Thug is certainly becoming easier to ignore.
Way back during the Civil Rights Movement, when the South was being dominated by vehement masses fueled by racism and a desire for segregation, Atlanta was deemed “The City Too Busy To Hate”. Surrounded by a backwards mentality, the city was noted for standing above it all, putting progression, innovation, and tolerability first. And it’s the same fast-paced, momentum-driven mindset that exists in Young Thug fifty years later. He’s an artist, hailed for his ability to take the trap sound Atlanta’s been toying with for the last few years and transform it into a sometimes ironic, sometimes genuine take on hip-hop, painting the scene in vibrant unconventionalities. But with Slime Season 3, the conclusion to his two-year series, he’s shown the same pattern of indiscernibility and a lacking quality control that’s made Future's recent output feel so forgettable.
While our score for I’m Up may be higher, that’s not to say Slime Season 3 is a worse offering. In fact, that’s far from the truth. But Slime Season 3 does represent the departure from the Young Thug that created 1017 Thug and Barter 6. Now what we have is a Young Thug whose work ethic is admirable, albeit severely flawed. Cohesion has been thrown away under the mixtape moniker, chalked up to that strung-together collection of random singles and throwaway tracks that weren’t up to par with the supposed quality he’s held out for on his upcoming Hy!£UN35. The days of Young Thug needing to change the sound of hip-hop are seemingly over. Now, we have a musician fully aware that his name alone will sell his outputs, regardless of how comparatively shoddy or ill put-together they are.
These may seem like heavy claims, especially considering Young Thug is probably the most divisive artist making music today. But it’s hard to argue that Slime Season 3 holds up to the past Slime tapes. Both had approximately 18 tracks, and while I may not have ever described their tone as “slimey”, both had an undeniable consistency in terms of sound and approach. The dark trap flavors were held together at the center of each song, even when Thugger was branching out into foreign territory in his traditional experimental fashion. But on Slime Season 3, that tone is gone. Tonally, it’s entirely inconsistent, with little regard for track ordering or maintaining a semblance of cohesion. “Slime ***” bounces around with synths that sound like shoes sliding and screeching on a basketball court, while “Digits” has an atmospheric layering that, coupled with its weak hook, feels like a track that was scrapped from Barter 6 but lazily resurfaced here.
And it’s not just a hunch that these tracks are half-baked leftovers from older days. London on da Track has come forward as saying the four tracks he produced on here were made two years ago (three of which were started and completed in a single day while both were high). To him, these tracks sound dated. For us, he says they’ll feel fresh. But they feel tangibly uninspired, a byproduct of innovation whose sole intention was to garner hype for Thugger’s full-length debut. If that was the intention, the eight tracks we’re given to close out the Slime series fall short. “Worth It” has the same underlying positivity that seeped throughout I’m Up, but the sentiments clash against what’s supposed to be a dark and grimy trap pastiche. It’s inclusions like these that make the mixtape feel forgotten by Young Thug, like he’s already set his sights on the next project and hastily scraped together something to satiate his waiting fans.
Luckily for them, a harebrained Young Thug is still better than most at their core. “Drippin’” shines as one of his best songs to date. He maintains a similar vibe that was found through the first Slime Season while ramping up his eccentricities. The delivery of “I wrote verse it was 3 bars like an Adidas Stan Smith nigga” is drawn out and elevated into a piercing squeal that unravels into an aggravated staccato-style stumbling of words and sounds. And lyrically, Thug is still combining the expected with the unexpected. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a track that doesn’t mention lean or liquor, but buried beneath the redundancies is the colorful comparisons and personality that make his tracks feel a few steps above something Future could pull together. With lines like “money long as a Greyhound” and “I got a white bitch and she give me that Becky but her name is Sari”, Young Thug continues his odd combination of criminality with an undertone of childishly imaginative humor.
Yes, Young Thug embodies all that’s encompassed with Atlanta’s “Too Busy To Hate”. But with the consistent delivery of inconsistent outputs, he’s slowly but surely chipping away at what used to be a solid foundation that was heightened by previously unseen vocalizations and variations to the hip-hop motif. He’s drifting into the middle ground that for so long has been beneath him, the sea of average rappers and traditional styling that acted as a catapult for his peculiarity. With London and Thugger both dismissing this year’s outputs as nothing when compared to Hy!£UN35, he seems to be painting it as a phoenix-style inception, one where the birth of his album format coincides with the death of his mixtapes. And given the total lack of discerning the standouts from the filler, it’s for the best that the ongoing assault of mixtape releases dies. As it stands, he may be too much of a character to hate, but Young Thug is certainly becoming easier to ignore.
Score: 58
Find our original review here: https://basementalitymedia.com/2016/04/02/slime-season-3-album-review/
