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Thursday, June 29, 2017
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

Young Thug is inventive 
on recent hip hop album 

By SHAYAN SHAFII

Daily Arts Writer

Ah, a man and his guitar. So 

much of the worst music of the 
last 100 years has been made by 
dudes crooning about women 
over four-chord loops. But some 
of it has been good, too. At best, 
romantic, sing-song-y guitar bal-
lads can be emotionally piercing 
and refreshingly honest; at worst, 
they can be made by guitarists 
from Illinois who go by “The 
Plain White T’s.”

Young Thug, born Jeffery Wil-

liams, is the latest of a long line 
of rappers to willfully assert 
hip-hop culture into something 
more, ahem, progressive. In his 
wake, a long line of adolescent 
weirdo-rappers with multicolor 
hair. That his latest effort, offi-
cially then unofficially titled 
Easy Breezy Beautiful Thugger 
Girls (now just Beautiful Thug-
ger Girls) would be “alternative,” 
even by his standards, has been 
a poorly kept secret over the last 

six months. Snip-
pets of album cuts 
have been in cir-
culation for years, 
and 
the 
album 

intro in particu-
lar, 
with 
Thug 

croaking in the southern drawl of 
a country singer, was clowned on 
immediately.

Less than a year ago we’d seen 

Thug mocked for donning a dress 
on the cover of Jeffery, and now, 
he returns with even greater 
style — this time, with a guitar. 

He joins a relatively short list of 
MCs who’ve survived near-fatal 
encounters with the instrument; 
recent survivors include André 
3000, Lil Wayne, Kid Cudi and, 
I guess, Frank Ocean too. All are 
revolutionary Black male rapper-
singer-songwriters who blur gen-
der lines and have no regard for 
tradition; Thug is certainly not in 
bad company.

To be perfectly clear, Beautiful 

Thugger Girls is misleading. Per-
haps it’s being marketed as some 
sort of 2017 Rebirth, but it’s really 
not that much of a radical devia-
tion from Thug’s traditional album 
structure. While his earliest mix-
tapes (and even recent Slime Sea-
son installments) tend to run 
amok, Thug cleaned up his act on 
the uncharacteristically polished 
Barter 6, Jeffery and now Beautiful 
Thugger Girls. Safe to say it’s not 
uncharacteristic anymore, but the 
untamed nature of his music has 
almost permanently branded him 
with these sorts of lazy labels.

Thug’s desire to belt out in song 

was always there, and in his own 
words, this is his “singing album.” 
He mainly sings about sex. Sex, 
to Young Thug, is like cocaine to 
Pusha T; they simply never run out 
of things to say no matter how nar-
row the scope. You get the sense 
that Thug simply has too much 
emotion to express himself within 
the confines of rap, men’s fashion 
or any human language. There is 
singing, yes, but there’s a lot of rap-
ping too. There’s a lot of whatever 
you want to call what Young Thug 
has been doing for the last five 

years, really. Kanye always joked 
that 808s & Heartbreak could have 
been a country album, but Thug 
actually managed to incorporate 
acoustic sonic elements into Thug-
ger Girls while still maintaining 
his largely undefinable pop-rap 
lane.

Album-opener “Family Don’t 

Matter” sees Thug harmonize 
with breakout London vocal-
ist Millie Go Lightly, with what 
is maybe supposed to be his best 
George Strait impression. He lets 
out a “yee-haw” less than 30 sec-
onds in, and Thug actually fools us 
all into thinking this might seri-
ously be a country album. You can 
practically hear him strain his face 
to annunciate “Country Billy made 
a couple millie / Tryna park the 
Rolls Royce inside the Piccadilly.” 
But relax, there are features from 
Future and Snoop Dogg later, and 
lyrics like “‘Bouta put my d*** in 
your mouth right when you yawn.” 
Still, it’s funny to see Thug be so 
tongue-in-cheek about the whole 
idea of the album.

He takes the backseat for the 

latter half of the song, letting Mil-
lie’s sweeping vocals shine. She 
has a prominent role throughout 
the first few tracks, which feels 
appropriate for an album so fix-
ated on Thug’s relationship with 
women. She appears again on “She 
Wanna Party,” which is another 
early highlight on the first half of 
the album where Thug front-loads 
so many standout tracks.

By EMILY BICE

Daily Arts Writer

Virginia, 1863. The Civil War is 

underway and America is a nation 
divided in more ways than North 
versus South or abolition versus slav-
ery. A country in the midst of a war 
also means the men are away fight-
ing while the women wait for their 
return. The boys are on the battle-
field, and the girls stay in the house.

Sofia Coppola’s reimagination 

of the 1971 Gothic drama, “The 
Beguiled,” offers a darkly comedic 
portrayal of life for a group of women 
during the Civil War, and just how 
complicated things get when a man 
comes into it. The film premiered 
this May at the Cannes Film Festi-
val, where it competed for the Palme 
d’Or. Though it did not win the cov-
eted award, Coppola was awarded 
“Best Director” for her work. She is 
the second female director to ever 
win this prize.

The award was well deserved. 

What makes the 2017 adaptation of 
“The Beguiled” watchable is cer-
tainly not its simple plot: an injured 
Union 
soldier, 
Corporal 
John 

McBurney, is taken in by the few 
remaining women at the Miss Mar-
tha Farnsworth Seminary for Young 
Ladies in Virginia and tensions rise 
until they boil over. Despite a plot 
identical to its 1971 predecessor, 
the 2017 adaptation tells a different 
story as a result of Coppola’s direc-
torial choices. It’s the nuanced dia-
logue, the flawless mise-en-scene, 
the subtlety of movement and the 
implications of subtext. By telling 
the story from the women’s per-

spective instead of from Corporal 
McBurney’s (as did the 1971 version), 
Coppola pivots the implications of a 
source material which can be con-
strued as misogynistic and demean-
ing towards women.

The film begins when 12-year old 

Amy (Oona Laurence, “Pete’s Drag-
on”) finds Corporal John McBurney 
(Colin Farrell, “The Lobster”) alone 
in the woods and at death’s door. She 
takes him back to the house, where 
he is begrudgingly allowed inside by 
Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman, “Big 
Little Lies”), who insists he can stay 
to heal. After he is better, they will 
— they must — hand him over to the 
Confederate soldiers. After all, they 
are good, Southern ladies. 

They might be good ladies, but 

they are ladies who have not had 
the company of anyone, much less 
an attractive young soldier, in quite 
some time. Before long, everyone in 
the house has developed some kind 
of attachment to Corporal McBur-
ney. For Amy, it is a sweet, innocent 
crush. For the shy schoolteacher 
Edwina (Kirsten 
Dunst, 
“Spider-

man”) it is deep, 
tender love. For 
the rebellious Ali-
cia (Elle Fanning, 
“20th 
Century 

Women”) it is full out lust. Corpo-
ral McBurney capitalizes on this 
and manipulates the lonely women 
as best he can, desperate to not be 
handed back over to the Confederate 
soldiers.

‘Beguiled’ is a 
strong remake

The Beguiled

Focus Features

Michigan Theater

Beautiful 
Thugger Girls

Young Thug

300

COURTESY OF 300

Young Thug rapping on “Safe” music video

COURTESY OF FOCUS FEATURES

Characters gather for a meal in “The Beguiled”

 MUSIC REVIEW
MOVIE REVIEW

See full story on
 MichiganDaily.com

See full story on
 MichiganDaily.com

