BUSINESS IS BUSINESS: Young Thug's Darkest Hour, the Album it spawned, and the Fight for His Life

How a half baked and broken album could be the Atlanta rappers most important work of his career. A reflection on BUSINESS IS BUSINESS one year later.

“If that’s true what this is is coercion…

“…witness intimidation, ex parte communications that we have a constitutional right to be present for,” said attorney Brian Steel in court on June 13th before being placed in cuffs in the Fulton County courtroom.

Steel who is a criminal defense attorney and according to his website: “tirelessly defended those accused of criminal misconduct since 1991 and has built a national criminal defense practice in state and federal courts based on exhaustive preparation, creative and novel motions, skillful appellate advocacy and zealous courtroom showdowns.”

On this day he is representing Jeffery Lamar Williams also known as Young Thug…

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BUSINESS IS BUSINESS: Young Thug's Darkest Hour, the Album it spawned, and the Fight for His Life by Ian Schiller

How a half baked and broken album could be the Atlanta rappers most important work of his career. A reflection on BUSINESS IS BUSINESS one year later.

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Olivia Rodrigo Spills Her Guts

Olivia Rodrigo's meteoric rise is a story of vengeful femininity.

Her 2021 debut album Sour achieved record-breaking success.

Despite the critical and commercial success of her debut album which

made her the youngest artist to ever debut at the top of the

Billboard Hot 100, her sophomore record has not only surpassed massive

expectations but has amplified her fervent female-rage vision for pop-rock.

“Halfway through making the record, I kind of had to shift my perspective into trying to write songs that I enjoy, trying to write songs that I would like to hear on the radio — not trying to beat what I did last time or please anyone.”

And that is exactly what Rodrigo delivers on GUTS. The record is mostly a thesis on what it isn’t and what Rodrigo isn’t.

It isn’t a traditional teen-pop album. It has broader appeal than even the catchiest pop records before it. It isn’t PG, I would say the cover on its own would earn it a PG-13 rating with the FCC and Rodrigo freely delivers swears along with sexually suggestive lyrics. It isn’t trigger-free or watered-down for the masses touching on subjects usually reserved for “more mature audiences”. It treads a fine line with subjects like suicide, sex, and substance use.

“I think that I'm a little bit more self-possessed and more confident, and know what I want to say more. I think the record is also a little cheeky at times, and that was a side of me that didn't really get showcased a ton on Sour.”

September 11, 2023: Dressed in a gray skirt suit with knee-high black combat boots, nails painted black, with knuckle rings spelling out “G-U-T-S” on her hand, it is 10 am in New York, and a mob of young women are chanting the lyrics to her single “Vampire”.

She can’t help but let out a smile every now and then throughout the performance.

Everything about and surrounding Guts evokes something that belongs in a sweaty basement show for a 1990s grudge group, albeit gift-wrapped into a 20-year-old with Disney-approved features.

But this isn’t surprising. Rodrigo has explained she grew up on Pearl Jam, No Doubt, The White Stripes, and Green Day. She was introduced and molded by the alternative rock scene that dominated the late 90s and early 2000s radio waves.

The first concert she attended was a Weezer show.

Yet, how could someone who can’t even order a drink legally have earned two number-one albums, five multi-platinum certifications, and three Grammys?

Why is Rodrigo’s hardcore pop-rock resonating so much?

For Rodrigo, staking a feminine claim within rock music has always been a goal:
“[I] always loved rock music, and always wanted to find a way that I could make it feel like me, and make it feel feminine and still tell a story and have something to say that’s vulnerable and intimate.”

Rock music has always been an environment inherently opposed to authority and the status quo. And often, the “harder” you go within rock the more counter-cultural it becomes - Jimi Hendrix, Ozzy Osbourne, Frank Zappa, Kurt Cobain, Tom DeLonge, Billy Joe Armstrong.

But the music industry has not always been a place where equity has ruled either. And it still isn’t.

“In 2022, 30% of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Chart were women, which was an improvement over 2021’s 23.3% and a significant increase since 2012. Across an 11-year span and 1,100 songs, the overall percentage of female artists was 22.3%. This is a ratio of 3.5 male artists to every 1 female artist.” per a 2023 USC study

But despite marginal improvements for women in the music industry, the story of Rodrigo’s success is not one of a female artist breaking through a glass ceiling or tilting the game in women’s favor. It is a story of rejecting the game altogether by embracing an anti-submissive and purposefully loud femininity.

Rodrigo blends her alt-rock influences with chart-dominating pop. Her fusion of angst and anger color her teenage breakup anthems:
Just watch as I crucify myself
For some weird second string
Loser who's not worth mentioning
My God, love's embarrassing as hell

What is really moving about Rodrigo’s music is how it invites a whole new generation of young people, specifically young women, to be joyfully angry.

“I love music that is dramatic and angry and enraged. I grew up listening to music like that. When I played shows for the last tour, I would look out in the audience and I'd see all these young girls screaming these angry songs, just crying and feeling so many emotions that they could just let out at this concert. That's not something that girls are encouraged to do on an everyday basis — or, you know, people in general. That's part of why I love music so much.”

There is a vengefulness in her music. It is not hard to imagine where young women would be able to channel such rage. From individual experience to the current cultural moment, there is a deep pool of anger to draw from. From the punitive judicial rulings over their bodies to a president bragging about groping women to disproportionate lack of representation to pay inequality to the day-to-day anxieties and dangers of existing in a chauvinistically phallic-centric society.

And after all of that, some guy will no doubt say something like, “You should smile more.”

Rodrigo explains in an interview with NPR that in her songwriting she always sought creative freedom, “I just always wanted to have autonomy over what I said and did.”

While this was answering a question about music making, I can’t help but feel like she is referring to a larger autonomy than just her songwriting. After all, she dedicated Lily Allen’s “Fuck You” to the Supreme Court after their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade at Glastonbury music festival.

In her interview discussing the album, Rodrigo repeatedly brought up the strong female role models that have inspired her and her music:

“I've grown up with so many incredibly strong, talented, inspiring role models, women songwriters that I've looked up to for a long time. And when I look back, I think they were my heroes because they were exactly who they were, and didn't cherry-pick parts of themselves to present to the public. I think that the best role model is the most true version of themselves.”

Looking at her music it is impossible not to feel the direction in which the anger and rage are directed or originate from.

For example, “all-american bitch” is a deeply political track that mocks the stereotypical ideal American girl. She evokes Coca-Cola and the Kennedy family, and screams “I know my place”. Clad in irony, Rodrigo punches back against these patriotic tropes, all of which are relics of another age and vestiges of a long-forgotten idealism that GUTS pushes against.

“All-america bitch” flips between soft acoustic and headbanging electric guitar riffs, instrumentally mirroring a duality she seems to reckon with throughout the album. Instrumentally and lyrically she is fighting against things she is and is not, or against the perception that society may have of her as a woman and artist. It is no a mistake that it is the opening song on the album.

In the music video for “Get Him Back”, Rodrigo is accompanied in the video by the blurred-out faceless figure of the guy she is singing about. Which is the typical scene for a break-up song that you would associate with teen pop.

But, forget the heartbreak songs that languish in hurt and oh-why-me-isms, Rodrigo wants to even the score. She wants to make her former lover “real sad” and she wants “sweet revenge”.

It’s reactive and angry and meaner than the pop songs of old. Calling men “hot”, “fame-fuckers”, and “blood-suckers”, Rodrigo embraces sexuality and screaming as acceptable reactions to existing.

But, there are also soft spots on the album. It is this give-and-take between the loud, hard portions and the vulnerable, soft pieces that allows each side of Rodrigo to resonate so much.

“I fell in love with Carole King and Pat Benatar and Joni Mitchell, all of these female singer-songwriters that I just thought were the coolest and wanted to emulate”

Her songwriting throughout the project is immaculate but it really shines through on ballads like “logical” and “the grudge” where she masterfully weaves beautiful rhymes and motifs throughout her dense lyrics. Songwriting after all is her true passion and it is clear on these tracks where she puts her pitchforks and torches down.

So why is she dominating the airwaves? Well, she has struck a rare cord, a cord both deeply serious and highly critical. Intentional or not, Rodrigo has made a profoundly consequential record.

She is not the first and she will not be the last to make important strides for women in music. Like the songwriters she idolized growing up, someone will come after Rodrigo and make another extremely important record, but the significance of her success should not be lost. She has complicated the state of femininity for the mainstream music industry and for society as a whole; that itself is an accomplishment meaningful enough to consider GUTS, not just album of the year, but a future classic.

Her successive chart-dominating performances are signaling a shift in cultural thinking and attitudes that mark important achievements, not just for music, but for cultural and political movements.

I am so happy that she has conquered the daunting sophomore album. She has separated herself as a true force in the music industry and I can’t wait to see where she takes her music next. One of the best things about Pop music is its natural dynamism. It can absorb and mold itself with whatever it wants to be. A lot like Olivia Rodrigo.

Authors note: It is not lost on me the irony of this being written from a white, male perspective. But I hope that I have written this with humility and fairness in any assessments or generalizations I have made about female existence that I do not have a firsthand understanding of.