Barter 6 Turns 10

One of the most bizarre videos that Young Thug ever posted to Instagram — and that is saying a lot — is one where he promotes the imminent release of Barter 6 by threatening his idol, Lil Wayne. The video begins with Thug in the studio, pouring up a styrofoam cup with what is implied to be lean, before taking an obviously fake sip. He announces to the camera that Barter 6 (then still titled Carter 6, before Wayne allegedly threatened to sue) will be out that Friday and that the album release show will take place in Wayne's home neighborhood of Hollygrove. "Meet me there, better yet, beat me there, yadigg," he mumbles before someone off screen shouts, "With them dicks too!" and the camera cuts to a group of unnamed men brandishing automatic weapons. The clip is vaguely menacing but also a little surreal — an obvious bit of theater clearly meant to provoke a response. We didn't yet know that we were watching a master at work.

Barter 6, which hit the internet 10 years ago today, was the first real curveball in a career that would be full of them. All the prerelease baiting of Wayne turned out to be a red herring; as much as his early work was informed by Wayne's gloopy melodies and stream-of-consciousness punnery, this was the record where Thug stepped out of the shadow of his influences and began to follow an unpredictable trajectory. Up to this point, most rap fans viewed Thug as a bit of a curio, a "post-lyrical" weirdo who somehow managed to stumble his way into internet notoriety by way of a few modest hits. Barter 6 upended all of those expectations. It's a subtle, impressionistic record, guided by a clear vision and aesthetic. Everything about it feels intentional. As a body of work, it might be the best thing he's ever done.

While future Thug releases would feature glorious highs and boundary-pushing performances, many also feel cobbled together — random assortments of tracks hastily assembled by Thug's engineer Alex Tumay in the wake of leaks. Barter 6 (which, to be fair, also leaked) feels more of a piece with the eternal Rich Gang mixtape that preceded it: the product of a small group of collaborators taking up residence in a studio and working feverishly around the clock, passing tracks back and forth. With the exception of "Halftime," the sound of the album was shaped by just two young producers — Wheezy and London On Da Track — working in collaboration with Tumay. Wheezy's production is breathy and dramatic while London, clearly a student of Zaytoven, leans heavily on minor-key piano melodies. The beats are skeletal and somber, and Young Thug moves like a liquid through these songs, filling every crack with a bar, an ad lib, or even just a yelp (the "skkkkrrrrrt" tire sounds are particularly cartoonish). Somehow, all of it sounds effortlessly musical.

The trickster, the jester, the chaos agent: All those sides of Thug are on full display throughout Barter 6, though they're tempered by a newfound restraint. It sometimes sounds like he's rapping under his breath on these songs, even as he casually switches up flows like he's flipping through radio stations. Thug had been derided as a "mumble rapper" for years before Barter 6’s release, but here, with the Auto-Tune dialed down and the music less busy, nearly everything he says is intelligible. "R.I.P. Mike Brown, fuck the cops," he shouts, a few bars before declaring "I take care of my kids, no matter what else I do" ...all on a song that's ostensibly about overdosing on drugs. This is how Thug operates: The profound thoughts and political statements sitting cheek-to-jowl with absurdist puns and endless bars about oral sex. Thug's worldview operates as a sort of subtext in these songs, hinted at by the melodrama that Wheezy and London bring to much of the production.

Coming from an artist who's known to work quickly, the songs on Barter 6 feel uncharacteristically refined. "With That" was apparently mastered and added to the album less than 24 hours before its release at London's urging, but you wouldn't know it by listening: The track is haunting and spare, and Thug gargles Auto-Tune on the choruses like a sinister robot. "Check" is an all-time Young Thug song — regal, dramatic, catchy — and might be single-handedly responsible for Thug's squeaky "sheesh!" ad lib entering the vernacular. "Halftime" sounds like the circumstances it was likely recorded in: late nights, empty streets, a smoke-filled control room. Thug takes a big leap on the chorus, stretching out words until they lose all meaning, the syllables just putty for him to reshape. "Numbers" is another classic that feels borne from the flow state that Thug and London seemed to find in the studio. "Got my brodie London in this motherfucker, man," Thug murmurs before wistfulling tracing a vocal line as it rises. "I go up, up, up and away," he sighs and you can picture Thug's skinny frame floating over Atlanta like a weather balloon as London's mournful piano and snare rolls sink into the track. Even the most persistent Genius annotators will never uncover the meaning of non-sequiturs like "no porcupine," and that's as it should be.

The album doesn't end the way you might expect. "Just Might Be" is built around a sample of then-buzzy electro-pop act Purity Ring (who were ahead of their time in applying their talents to rap production) that sounds like one long exhale; Pi'erre Bourne would flip this same song three years later when producing Playboi Carti's "Fell In Luv". Unlike the bouncy latter song, "Just Might Be" feels pensive, conflicted. "Living life bro, I'm happy…nothing more nothing less," Thug deadpans at the outset of the song before launching into an animated flow that recalls his old partner, the late Rich Homie Quan. Despite the fact that it closes out the album, "Just Might Be" is a pure rapping workout, with Thug spending most of the song spitting furiously in double-time. It ends what's otherwise a fairly sleepy album on a noticeably unsettled note.

Barter 6 was Thug's first record for 300 Entertainment, and label boss Lyor Cohen took a famously hands-on approach to managing Thug's career — and steering it toward the mainstream — around this time. It's surprising, then, that Barter 6’s few features tilt heavily toward underappreciated Southern veterans (Boosie Badazz, T.I.) and people from his immediate orbit that he had real chemistry with (Young Dolph, Lil Duke, Yak Gotti). In hindsight, this was the beginning of Thug repositioning himself as the new torchbearer for Atlanta rap (and Southern hip-hop more broadly), rather than some kind of anomaly in an 8-year-old's dress. In contrast to hit-chasing labelmates like the Migos, Thug opted to follow a path more like Boosie's: gradually building regional support in order to become his own stylistic center of gravity. Even Cohen probably wouldn't have predicted that Thug would have more longevity — and would arguably exert more influence on rap — than the rest of the 300 roster.

It's hard to pinpoint the influence of Barter 6 specifically; it's such a singular album, even within Young Thug's discography, and no one has attempted to make anything quite like it since. It's also difficult to imagine Thug's path to mainstream stardom without it. Having reset any expectations about his career, he would continue to push the boundaries of rap vocals with his Slime Season series, score a crossover hit with his appearance on Jamie XX's "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)" (try to picture anyone else delivering the line "Imma ride in that pussy like a stroller" with a straight face), ruffle feathers with the outlandish couture of Jeffrey, and, eventually, score a number one album with the star-studded So Much Fun. Along the way, he would influence plenty of artists directly, including YSL signees Gunna and Lil Baby, who would become streaming juggernauts as solo artists. And then there's his vast, indirect influence: Thug's mutations of Southern flows created new lanes that stars like Yeat and Playboi Carti still mine to this day.

Until recently, the dark cloud hanging over this legacy was the worry that Thug might never make music again. The YSL RICO trial — the longest trial in Georgia's history — wrapped up at the end of 2024 after more than 12 months of arguments (salute to @ThuggerDaily for being the only consistent source of news coming out of that courtroom). Throughout, the state tried to paint Thug as a kind of mob boss, responsible for directing multiple crimes including murders, but seemed to have almost no hard evidence that tied him to these events. Thug eventually walked free on Halloween 2024, after refusing a plea deal that would have required him to admit that his music "encouraged people to commit violence." He instead received a commuted sentence from the judge (time served with 15 years probation) but with some unusually onerous terms: He is barred from the metro Atlanta area for a decade, and the judge lectured him about not alluding to violence in his lyrics. "[Y]ou know, I come from nothing and I've made something," Thug wrote in a statement provided on the day of his release. "I didn't take full advantage of it. I'm sorry." Despite it all, Young Thug is still here, discovering new flows and cadences, making headlines and influencing a new generation of artists. It's hard to imagine a more fitting validation for Barter 6, his most cohesive body of work and the album where he first hinted he might be in this for the long haul.