As darkness blanketed the United States, a metaphorical light danced for 4:27. The passing of a torch. The official christening of the new face of hip-hop. Jay Z has long been cast aside, as his businessman status dominates. Kanye West is Kanye West. Lil Wayne, for better or worse, has been the one to carry hip-hop's mainstream torch since his mid-2000s mixtape run. And now, "has been" is willingly applied to his reign because of his appearance on the new Rich Gang cut "Take Kare" with Young Thug. Quality of the song regardless, these few minutes contain incalculable symbolic weight



First, a quick primer on the Thug-Wayne relationship. When Young Thug burst onto the rap scene, his 2011 debut effort I Came From Nothing resembled a manifestation of "good artists borrow, great artists steal"; this was an unapologetic imitation of the late-2000s Lil Wayne. No matter how hard journalists tried to pry, only Wayne's name came up as an influence on Thug. But as Young Thug's development as a rapper turned into a development as an artist in every sense of the word, the Wayne training wheels began to fall off. Thugger got weirder. Thugger looked deeper into himself. And the Birdman co-sign that brought on the inevitable collaboration we have before us is an inverse of what said collaboration would have sounded like in 2011



This sound is different in two key ways: how the rapping is done and when each rapper spits. The post-Migos flow that Young Thug, as with his Lil Wayne influences, crafts into his own indistinguishably euphoric style becomes the flow employed by Wayne. The placing of Wayne on the back end of the track, in normal times, says very little. But the length of time it takes before any semblance of Wayne appears tells that this is a Thug track, a Thug spotlight, and a Thug coronation. At this point, the Wayne imitation of Thug says everything in its style that needn't be examined lyrically (but will be on this site!)



For an artist whose career was founded on mimicking Lil Wayne, Weezy is the least similar Rich Gang member to what the World of Young Thug sounds like. For an incomparable marketer like Birdman, thrusting an artist into the spotlight exemplifies the flawless strategy so far employed regarding Thugger's Rich Gang ascendance



To address the requisite doubt that comes with heaping praise and impactful claims such as these: Young Thug has reached the point where "I just want to nut, she say that's easy like a baker" can't be dismissed as a wack line. Lil Wayne knows something about a peak like that