Close to six months after pleading guilty to six counts of gang and racketeering charges, Young Thug has finally opened up about the more than two years he spent behind bars during the long-running YSL trial in a new GQ interview. He described himself as an “innocent man” during the interview, claiming he pleaded guilty to avoid a harsher sentence. “Just pleading to something you know that you didn’t do is crazy,” he said. “But you get a chance to keep fighting. [You can] worry about the jury’s fate, or you [can] just go ahead now and go home. It’s like shit. Go home.”
Regarding the time he spent in jail, Young Thug said little. “It was real,” he said. “Don’t want to deal with it again, but definitely it was real.”
He said that the fact that his trial was the longest in Georgia’s history made him feel good about himself. “I just feel big,” he said. “I feel like I’m one of the biggest stars.” The number of people in the courtroom, widespread media coverage, and the way the judge communicated with him also spoke to his ego. “The judge was just like, ‘Yo, you got to realize who you are,’” he said. “My lawyer, Brian Steel, he always told me every day, like, ‘Bro, you got to know. You got to know.’ And then me just sitting in the cell every night alone, it was just kind of like, ‘I’m big.’”
It got to the point where he thought the whole experience was meant to be a divine lesson. “I think I’m too big for jail, but I think I’m not too big for God,” he said. “So God could put the biggest person in there. I feel like I’m taller than the jail, but he somehow could just squish me in there. I think it was like a God thing.” Later in the interview, he said he was still trying to figure out why God put him in the situation.
Several others were also in the same situation — the case of the State of Georgia v. Young Stoner Life (YSL), which alleged that Young Thug’s YSL Records (Young Stoner Life) also operated as a street gang (Young Slime Life.) Some people took plea deals, some were acquitted. “I think I love people so much to the point where the only thing that’ll make me not love you anymore, or just dislike you, is betrayal,” he said. “Like real-life betrayal.”
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While incarcerated, he found that many prison guards were his fans, asking him about his lyrics while bossing him around. Some were even younger than him.
But Young Thung said what while behind bars, his career was actually the last thing on his mind, with family and kids coming first. Now that he’s out and sizing up his career again, there are certain things he can’t write rhymes about. “I can’t do nothing like gang things or stuff like that on the internet,” he said.
Part of that is because prosecutors used some of the artist’s lyrics as evidence against him during the trial. “I just got a few lyrics where I just rap about street stuff and those are the lyrics that they tried to use against me,” he said. “But most of the time I don’t rap about that type of stuff.”
That said, Young Thug felt ambivalent about the way his words were used in court. “It felt kind of crazy,” he said. “And cool. Because it’s like, ‘Oh, everybody listen to me.’ But crazy. Like, the First fucking Amendment is freedom of speech.”
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Now, Young Thug said he’s reconsidering some of his lyrics “because just the impact that you got on the community, the youth,” he said. “Not because of the law. More so just like realistically kids actually listen to us. Like, all right, we got to dumb it down some.”
Young Thug released a new song, “Money on Money,” which features Future, this week. The artist intends to release a new album, Uy Scuti, but has not yet confirmed a release date. He’s slated to perform at the Summer Smash Festival in June.
