In January of 1995, Kevin Powell, an original Real World cast member turned hip-hop scribe, went to Rikers Island for a Vibe cover story. There, Tupac Shakur had been locked up for a few months on a sexual abuse conviction and was feeling like he was at a breaking point. Nervously chain-smoking Newports and dismayed by loneliness, broken brotherhoods, and a narrative that he could no longer control, Pac gave one of the rawest interviews in rap history. Thirty years later, it’s still fascinating to read, as Pac is thrown into the fire, laying all of his unbridled emotions and contradictory morals out there. In detail, he discusses the night he was shot at Quad Recording Studios in Times Square and he also tells of his interactions with the woman who accused him of sexual assault. It’s not a surprise that, in the midst of this, he dropped his incredibly fatalistic and paranoid third album, Me Against the World.
At times in Powell’s interview, Pac talks about himself like a God, like when he recalls meeting Pro Football Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott and former top NBA draft pick Derrick Coleman at the club and how their praise made him come to a realization: “They were people’s heroes and they saying I was their hero. I felt above and beyond, like I was glowing.” It’s hard to know what exactly is the truth, but he’s such an entertaining storyteller that you want to believe everything that comes out of his mouth. I think of the moment when he describes walking bloody and full of bullet wounds into the studio where Biggie, Diddy, and record exec Andre Harrell were the night of the shooting, like it was one of the surreal nightmares in The Manchurian Candidate. Deeply reverent of gangsters and the street code, Pac comes at it all from that perspective, admitting to the root of his strife being the betrayal of dudes he considered brothers and a shifting public perception. “The No. 1 thing that bothered me was that dude that wrote that shit that said I pretended to do it,” he confessed. “That I had set it up, it was an act. When I read that, I just started crying like a baby, like a bitch.” Wrapped inside of his fuck-the-world attitude was a man who didn’t just want to be loved but felt he had earned the right to be loved unquestionably.
You could say the same thing about Young Thug, who has spent the last few weeks spiraling via X, “leaked” songs, and an unhinged three-hour podcast interview with Atlanta OG Big Bank for The Big Facts Network. Yes, one of the greatest rappers of the 2010s, the once-enigma who, at his peak, took a strain of melodic Atlanta trap music to the brink, is in near tears on a show that’s like Dr. Phil for Atlanta street dudes.
What seems to have set Thug off is that he feels that he was made an example of while he was in jail fighting the RICO charges brought against him and his YSL crew by the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney, Fani T. Willis. The YSL case turned into one of the most high profile hip-hop trials of all time, a pure shitshow that felt misguided from the jump, with prosecutors who seemed to be on a mission to make names for themselves by dividing the premier rap city of the 21st century and taking down one of its faces. Adding to Thug’s dismay is that he seems to feel that he was stabbed in the back by his close friends, namely Gunna, his longtime little homie who became the co-face of YSL. Gunna took a plea deal, in 2022, and it was interpreted by the most salacious parts of the rap internet as “snitching”—all while having his authenticity cross-examined by randos in the Instagram comments section of stuff like Say Cheese TV pointing out Thug’s hypocrisies considering he also pleaded guilty.
In the complicated, thorny, offensive, manipulative, sometimes hilarious, sometimes uncomfortable video interview, which evokes the feeling of an uncle sitting down with his hardheaded nephew, Thug is reeling and full of so much anxiety that his legs are shaking. He’s genuinely confused and disillusioned about why Gunna (guy whom he repeatedly accuses of snitching) gets to move on with his life and pivot into a career as a wholesome wellness rapper who does HIIT instruction for the VMAs and hosts Under Armour–sponsored 5k runs in Prospect Park, while he (guy who he feels followed the honor code of the streets) is under the microscope of the internet.
Important context for Thug’s tell-all interview is that it happened amid two weeks of leaked jail calls that featured him gossiping and shit-talking pretty much the entire mainstream rap world. There are new clips online everyday. Nobody knows where exactly they’re coming from, but the conspiracies are flying. Is it the Fulton County government? Gunna fan pages? Some dude whom Young Thug called a “buster” in the fifth grade? Who knows! But those same salacious corners of the internet are using these audio files as proof that Young is at worst a “snitch” and at best a “pillow talker.”
This is kind of where the parasocial, street-fetishizing rap internet has been headed since the days of Chicago drill beef pages on YouTube, and Thug is leaning into it by actually doing this big interview. It’s nevertheless a mesmerizing watch, so much so that I powered through almost the whole thing in one sitting. With his natural charisma and naked emotion, Thug and Big Bank go all the way back to rapper’s childhood traumas (his apartment complex burning down, his older brother dying in front of him) to try to get to the bottom of his emotional outbursts. “My aunties and uncles and stuff treated my mama’s family a certain way. It made me want love so bad; that’s when I started meeting friends,” he says, when explaining why brotherhood and honor mean as much to him as a samurai in an Akira Kurosawa flick.
That’s an understandable perspective, but where the morals of the interview get so twisted is how much weight Thug gives to being a millionaire and why that’s a big reason he should not just be respected but revered. In pretty comedic sections of the interview that feel both honest and full of shit—he’s an unreliable narrator but a quote machine—he portrays himself as Atlanta rap’s Mother Theresa, a benevolent soul who helped build up Gunna out of the goodness in his heart. All the while, he’s also calling him a broke-ass nigga whom he helped only out of pity. One of my favorite quotes of the entire interview is when he says, completely deadass, “I thought I was wholesome. I thought I was, like, the perfect man, until this situation at hand right now made me realize, damn, bruh I’m actually fucked-up,” as Big Bank sits patiently like a therapist.
This interview will stick with Thug forever, first in memes and then as part of his reputation. I’m not sure that’s a good thing, as the sprawling, rambly podcast format doesn’t do him any favors, especially while he’s in such an emotionally volatile state. It’s missing the clarity, flow, and heart of Kevin Powell’s written interview with 2Pac and it’s so goddamn repetitive— especially when it comes to how much of the conversation revolves around “what it means to be a man.” By the end, it’s clear that the point of all of this is for Thug to ingratiate himself to the men in his life and online who are skeptical of his realness, so it’s not a surprise when he scrapes the bottom of the barrel and drifts into a homophobic tangent that kills all momentum and goodwill.
Thug’s preexisting relationship with Big Bank also makes the conversation feel very intimate, though sometimes to a fault. They often get too lost in the intricacies of Atlanta street politics and the YSL case, stuff interesting only to fans of Trap Lore Ross YouTube documentaries. An actual journalist might have even touched on one of the big topics most notably light in the interview: music. Thug’s argument is essentially: How could the internet turn on someone who is as real and rich as me? But the real argument should be: How could the internet turn on someone who has made Tha Tour Pt. 1 and Slime Season 2 and “Danny Glover” and “ The Blanguage”? Further, there’s a real case to be made that the D.A.’s office’s war against him and YSL wasn’t just about him but an attempt to set a precedent on how to wipe out entire rap scenes countrywide. (It probably didn’t hurt Fani Willis and her office to make headlines, too, as they were investigating Trump for racketeering at the same time as the Thug and Gunna indictments.) But Thug is too blinded by his own ego to realize any of that. That’s probably more a reflection of modern-day Young Thug than anything else, where the music is an afterthought to gossip and the CEO life.
There is a little hope, at least, for Young Thug the rapper. As all of this was going down, two songs were “leaked,” and they capture the rawness he was going for on The Big Facts Network in a few minutes, instead of three hours. The first is “Feels Good,” an electric Lil Baby collab where a pained Young Thug recaps his last few years: “In a cell facing a life sentence I couldn’t even breathe,” he raps in a cartoonishly deep voice that is like half Carti on Music and half Muscle Man. It reminds me of what I once loved so much about Thug’s music, so silly and serious all at once.
Then, there is the two-parter “Closing Arguments,” which also has a pretty legit-looking video of Thug moping around a basically empty mansion. The first half isn’t that memorable: Thug, in the same routine, styleless flow he’s been using in the past several years, calls Gunna and a bunch of the YSL dudes (YSL Obama, YSL Hilary, YSL Biden—OK, only one of those is real) “rats” over a knockoff Whole Lotta Red beat. But it’s all worth it for the switch-up, where the beat nearly fades into mist as Thug breaks out his incredible shaky falsetto. He sounds wounded and devastated and lonely as he reflects on losing the love of the friends he was just shitting on two minutes ago. “How I get more love from a freak/Than I get from niggas that grew up in the streets with me?” he sings, fully leaning into the melodrama. He even works in a bit of that eccentric touch that made him such a one-of-one rapper, like the little dragged-out lilt he hits when he goes, “I got a fat mama.” It’s so Thug. His contradictions are out in the open. The walls feel like they’re closing in on him. In this verse, it’s less about the drama and more about the effect the drama has had on him. It’s so good that, for a moment, it made me wonder if Thug has got his own Me Against the World in him.