Even though I’d call myself a spoiled white girl, recently I have been obsessed with the happenings of East Atlanta Zone 6. It started off with my AP research project. Although it started off as a investigation of crime in high-poverty neighborhoods, meant to investigate how to best lower recent upticks in violent crime, it quickly evolved into reading police reports and studying rapper drama. As such, when I found out a while ago that Young Thug, someone I traveled to LA to see a couple years ago, was on trial for being the apparent ringleader of a sector of the bloods, I was immediately intrigued. 

Jeffery Williams, or Young Thug aka. Young Truly Humble Under God, has already been in jail for near two years as of writing this article. He was initially charged along with 27 of his cohorts however this number has been knocked down to 5 as a result of countless guilty pleas and “snitches and rats.” He is being charged for violating the RICO or Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, which is basically just dealing with how to handle violent gang activity. Fun fact, it was also used to charge Donald Trump for  trying to tamper with the results of the 2020 election. His record label YSL, or Young Slime Life, has been accused of being a subset of the bloods and responsible for multiple murders over the span of 2015-2021. His followers in YSL call him “King Slime” and truly look up to him. One defendant for Fulton County said “They knew who their leader was, and they knew the repercussions of not obeying their leader.” 

Although there were originally 56 charges against the group, only two of these are actually aimed at Young Thug. His main charge is being accused of hiring someone to kill a man named Big Nut, who was a highly ranked member of another subset of the bloods and prominent in the rap scene, similarly to Thug. Young Thug was accused of hiring someone to kill Nut and renting a silver car for them to use, slipping the killer several bands and telling him to keep himself on the DL. Further charges were brought onto Mr. Thug as a result of a search of his mansion, in which an illegal machine gun was uncovered. 

Thankfully, Young Thug has many supporters who have his back through even the toughest of cases. His defendants claim that the lyrics in his music are a reflection of him and his friends’ lives grown up on the streets, emphasizing the rapper’s rags to riches story and path from despair to being an worldwide star. Popular songs such as “Pushing P” and “P Power” have been questioned, and Thug and his defenders have fired back saying that the P in these songs stands for prayer rather than what one might expect. Although it is hard for me to think that the song “P power” is actually about prayers, I have to give it to them because that lyrical explanation actually worked in their favor. Although this case is bound to be long and stretched-out, predicted to span over the course of the next year, I have faith that Young Thug will make it out of this one and continue to produce more of the music we love.