On “Phoenix,” the eighth song on the new Young Thug mixtape Slime Season 2, Thug is talking to a woman, and he tells her this: “You can have my son, no Phoenix.” This is one of the most puzzling rap lines I’ve heard in recent memory, and the puzzling thing about it is, paradoxically enough, the clarification that it includes. Thug is talking to a woman about maybe the most serious thing you can talk about. He is saying, “Let’s bring another life into this world together.” He’s saying, “Let’s create a human being out of nothing. This is a journey that I want to take with you.” And he is also saying, “By the way, I am not referring to the Phoenix Suns, the professional basketball franchise. You might’ve been confused by the phonetic similarity between the words ‘son’ and ‘Sun,’ but don’t be. I’d just like to reiterate that the Phoenix Suns, the team that includes Eric Bledsoe and Brandon Knight and has a pretty good chance of making it into the competitive Western Conference playoffs this year — they’re not what I’m discussing here. Rather, I am referring to a baby.” That line is part of the song’s chorus, so Thug says it a bunch of times. He wants to make sure it comes across. That’s not a brilliant rap line or anything. Really, it confounds the entire idea of brilliant rap lines, since it operates on a whole different logic system than what you or I might use. But it’s a line that shows what kind of level Young Thug is working on. He doesn’t think like the rest of us.