Young Thug YSL Trial: This Was a Warning

By Craig Jenkins, a Vulture music critic who also covers TV, comedy, and video games

The emotional roller coaster of State of Georgia v. Jeffrey Williams, et al — the RICO case that sought to tie rapper Young Thug’s Young Stoner Life label and crew to a sprawling web of shootings and drug deals through lyrics, affiliations, and public and private correspondence — took an uplifting turn yesterday when the YSL founder was set free. The state had sought to put Thug away for 20 years but made a sloppy case, mind-palacing connections between rap lyrics he may or may not have written and real-life crimes that, as Thug’s lawyer Brian Steel noted in a rousing rebuttal to the state’s closing remarks, didn’t make sense chronologically.

The trial, the longest in the history of Georgia, was at times a circus, accentuating flaws in the RICO Act and its applications. Prosecutors took liberties in interpreting defendants’ literary work to imply a criminality bleeding into every aspect of their lives. It felt like rap itself was on trial. The state thought it was sending a message that brazen lawlessness in the genre had racked up a ghastly body count and must be reined in at all costs. But what it actually communicated was a feeling that if you, as a homespun rap-success story, regularly associate with, provide for, or try to get through to people with spotty legal histories, you can expect wiretaps and accusations.

There is a truth to the complaint inherent in discussions about the enthusiastic ultraviolence in and around trap and drill in the past decade. Rap is a commercial and creative outlet not unshackled from the overarching jingoist predilections binding its place of origin. We like a rapper to be rough and authentic but recoil from the prickly points when the universe tosses us a real one. Fans revere work that is pridefully unscrewed from stuffy mainstream society and highlights moral gray areas, from N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police” to Jay-Z’s “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” to Rich Gang’s “Lifestyle.” But increasingly, we gorge on rumors of strife between camps, feigning shock when lit fuses collide with powder kegs. In a brighter timeline, charges implicating Chicago’s Lil Durk in a chilling revenge-murder plot against rapper Quando Rondo would inspire fierce soul-searching in fan circles about years of irresponsible plays, like the memeification of calls for Durk’s Only the Family label to retaliate and “slide for Von,” the OTF signee who was killed during a 2020 skirmish with Rondo associates. Instead, the refrain pivots to a crestfallen “Free Durk.” When conflict boosted by spectators and fueled by posturing in music reaches law enforcement and judiciary radars, there’s no guarantee the understanding of intent and tradition that tells listeners how much of a rapper’s grit is kayfabe will hold.

The week in July when GA v. Williams, et al. shuffled judges twice expresses how much of a dice roll it can be to get a fair shake in a trial like this. The state’s inability to present an airtight case for Thug as kingpin says a RICO charge can demonize defendants by implicating them in bigger crimes than prosecutors are able to immediately prove, jamming up livelihoods and breaking up families. YSL’s first arbiter, Fulton County Superior Court judge Ural Glanville, ruled that lyrics could be used as evidence and took an icily literal approach to the music, which culminated in a melodramatic recitation of the chorus from Slime Season 3’s “Slime Shit.” As in Louisiana rapper Boosie Badazz’s 2010 first-degree-murder trial, the portrayal of Thug lyrics as timely confessions and statements of intent fell apart after ferocious retort, protecting the rhetorical agency of art and artist under great duress. You wonder how these bumbling, bombastic proceedings serve their actual victims and why prosecutors struggle to pin these cases on their marks if rappers are the careless, hardened criminals who tell on themselves that the courts paint them to be.

It was a joyful shock to the system watching Young Thug abruptly get his life back after facing these aspersions. But this isn’t the end of his journey. His sentence — five years in prison, commuted to time already served — includes 15 years probation. Probationary stipulations are intricate. Thug must avoid metro Atlanta, and most of his co-defendants — barring Gunna and his brother Quantavious “Unfoonk” Grier, the latter of whom is now serving nine years — and host four presentations a year denouncing gang violence, all the while making sure not to push it in his own music. The penalty for breaching the terms of the nonnegotiated plea deal he took to be done with deliberations is 20 years in prison.

The growing Minority Report vibes and the evidence that Feds are neck-deep in hip-hop media and culture, connecting the wrong dots, arouse a numbing resignation about future overreach. But it’s important to remember that we have a measure of influence in the choice of voices we amplify in criminal cases and the ability to vote for judges. Rap fans who hate the hail of uncertainty and confusion a high-profile trial brings nowadays must be wise to content creators who thrive on misinformation and get too many kicks from internecine strife in hip-hop and the communities sourcing it (especially with conspiracies swarming the Diddy case on the docket for 2025). We must also get granular about the local officials holding sway in these stories to curb their tendencies toward seeking extreme punishments through tacking on dubious charges and toward litigation of rap music using lurid assumptions of intent. We can’t just gather to nudge the U.S. presidency out of the grip of accelerationists every four years and disperse. Fulton County DA Fani Willis indicting YSL in Georgia is a reminder that angling for exorbitant punishments through overbroad indictments crosses party lines. We have seen analogues all over the country, like the 2016 Bronx raid the U.S. Department of Justice touted as one of the “largest gang takedowns in New York history,” until reporting revealed that some half of its alleged 120 rival crew members and associates had no legitimate affiliation. The dozens indicted last September in Georgia on RICO and domestic-terrorism charges for protesting plans for a lavish Atlanta police-training facility face the same time-buying, life-destroying, carceral-state pressure. As we celebrate Thug evading his worst-case scenario, let’s also consider the political machinery that put it on the table in the first place.