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When I drove there in February, the street corner where many of the old apartments stood was muddy and overgrown. “Anything you see wrong with me came from my projects, Jonesboro South,” he told The Fader in 2013. His family was still living there until the day the development closed its doors. In 2008, the home that had constituted Williams’s entire world was deemed a blight and slated for demolition. Twenty years later, all of the city’s public-housing developments had been flattened to dust. Much of Atlanta was seen as a blank slate for redevelopment, and it was just a matter of time before its project dwellers became casualties. The Games called for updated infrastructure, new venues, and housing for athletes. It meant convincing the world that its experiment in Black rule, personified by an uninterrupted line of Black mayors starting in 1974, had not degenerated into crime and ruin. For the city’s Black leaders, earning the Olympics didn’t just mean staving off the nagging idea that they were running a minor-league city at best and a provincial backwater at worst. After generations of white flight and a hollowing out of the inner city, Atlanta was on the cusp of transformation. The backdrop of Williams’s boyhood was upheaval. This may be his greatest strength as an artist - his ability to channel the trap’s malaise, its anguish, its thrill. If it could be captured by a sound, it might be Young Thug’s voice: a shrill warble that careers among dazed murmurs, haunting melodies, and primal barks. Trap music’s spiritual home is a place where drugs are manufactured and sold, but that is also a psychic snare.

“I wore this long-ass dress because I had a motherfucking AK-47 up under it,” Williams said in 2019. 8 on “The Billboard 200” and made several end-of-year lists, he posed in a ruffled dress that drew plaudits from music journalists and ridicule from peers.īut if his fashion sense was as outré as rap’s other oddballs’, his methods of self-defense were more suited to the trap subgenre that he helped popularize and that later took over Atlanta’s music scene. For the cover of his 2016 mixtape, Jeffery, which charted at No. The flamboyant André became a stylistic forebear for Williams, who, as a budding rapper himself, would adopt the handle Young Thug. “The South got something to say,” declared André 3000 from the stage, a rebuke to the bicoastal sniping that had consumed rap in the Death Row–versus–Bad Boy era. As a kid growing up in the 1990s and early aughts, he saw Atlanta’s rise to rap dominance firsthand, an explosion sparked by OutKast’s triumph at the 1995 Source Awards.

Jonesboro South and its adjacent stretch of Cleveland Avenue were where Williams found music. He has rapped about how his dad shot his mom and her lover when he caught her cheating, and he sold drugs to make ends meet. Jeffery’s childhood experiences were as grim as they were indelible: He was the second-youngest of 11 children and watched his elder brother Bennie get murdered in front of him over a gambling dispute.

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He grew up in the Jonesboro South projects in a desolate corner of the city, “a forgotten place among a series of forgotten places on the south side,” King Williams, a documentary filmmaker, told me. Jeffery Williams was born in 1991, the year after Atlanta won its bid to host the 1996 Olympic Games.