One of the things I’m surprised about, I tell him, is how relaxed he always seems. Photograph: Henrique Plantikow for the Guardian Young Thug performs at Boston’s House of Blues. Hits bring money, money bring power, power bring fame, fame change the game Young Thug You gotta stop, you can’t do drugs, I’ve been slacking drugs,” he says, lean still in hand. Does he enjoy it more than playing in the US? “Europe is a trillion times tighter than the US. “This is one of the first tours I did where I wasn’t rushing to go home,” he says. I worry he might be monosyllabic, but he seems in a good mood. He’s handed a cup of purple medicinal liquid in a polystyrene cup which is known in the hip-hop world as “lean”, a powerful codeine-based cocktail that is supposed to make you lethargic and slurry. He’s joined on the sofa by his new fiance, his sister who is also his manager and a few other members of his entourage. It’s hardly the intimate setting you’d want.
Eventually it’s agreed that we’ll have to wait until after the show – which is explosively energetic and musically ramshackle, Thug mostly shouting over the full versions of his own songs, with the vocals still turned up – and then at around 11.30pm, I am shown into the dressing room. I am told this every 30 minutes for the next five hours. We get to the venue, and I’m told Thug will be there in about 30 minutes. In a Dazed & Confused interview earlier this year, the writer said: “Each time he speaks more than five words, it feels like an astounding gift from the universe.”
He missed two photoshoots for a Complex magazine cover last year, eventually showing up at the third and answering six questions with two-word answers: “The quickest interview in history,” according to the writer. I sense she has had a few issues in the past. “It might not be a traditional interview,” warns his publicist.
The plan today is to catch Thug for a few hours before his London debut to get a sense of the man. His surrealist imagery is compounded by his music videos, which combine hip-hop cliches with Lynchian dream sequences – his recent video for Best Friend features Thug walking in on himself making out with his female alter ego, before his ghost sits down to a breakfast cereal dinner party. He talks about his own beauty (“I’m a fuckin’ stunna, ass big, Hummer”) and outlandish personality (“I’m an earthling in disguise”) in a way no other rapper would. His latest mixtape, Slime Season, presents an almost sci-fi version of rap excess. You might expect this seeming disjunction to influence his music, but his lyrics rarely ponder the realities of his complex existence, instead portraying a bombastic and often surreal version of his life. Rumours about his sexuality abound, but Thug says he is neither gay nor straight. He doesn’t pretend to have left gang life behind – on his outro to a Dej Loaf track released last year he snarks, “As a matter of fact, I’m one of the biggest Bloods in fucking America” – but these days he is probably better known for his gender-fluidity, recently photographed in a tutu, a lace floral Gucci top and a leopard-print dress. He is one of the most interesting characters in hip-hop today, seemingly drunk on his own eccentricity. All of that might create the picture of a typical gangster-turned-rapper but, in fact, nothing about Thug (which is apparently what even his closest friends call him) is typical.