Young Thug: "Constantly Hating" [ft. Birdman]

The beat to “Constantly Hating” sounds six miles away from you. It is distant production, like staring into the old “verdant green field” Windows desktop wallpaper and hallucinating music from the far hill. All we hear clearly is a hint of melody and the boom of the bass.

It’s audaciously quiet, and so when human exclamation point Young Thug pops up on this deserted landscape, he sticks up even straighter. The list of things Young Thug is great at keeps growing—making great rapping sound like gibberish and vice versa, dressing, Instagram-trolling, album-titling, hook-writing—but they all stem from one essential skill: He is incredible at making himself seem remarkable. No matter the context, Young Thug is going to find a way to be the stray hair.

Here, he pulls way, way back. There is less Young Thug happening on this song, at any given second, than on most of his tracks, where he tends to be crowding the frame from every conceivable angle. He almost whispers his first verse, before leaping up to punch an octave-leap melody on the phrase “We not friendly either you know it!” Birdman, who sounded slightly out-of-time rapping next to Lil Wayne in 2005, sounds much older here, a defiant fragment of 1999 washed up on the futuristic shores of 2015.

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