Hear Young Thug’s Elton John-Sampling “Rocket Man”
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Young Thug released his Slime Language compilation project last week — and got arrested during the listening party at Dave & Buster’s — but of course our man Jeffery always has more music in the vault. Today we get to hear one intriguing artifact from those archives: a song billed as Thugger’s remix of Elton John’s “Rocket Man.”
This isn’t the first interaction between the two music legends. John expressed his admiration for Young Thug back in 2015. They met the following year, after which Thug and Wyclef Jean teamed up on a song alternately titled “Elton” and “Elton John.”
And now there’s this. Really the new “Rocket Man” is not a remix so much as a Young Thug song built around an Elton John sample, but man is it pretty. It’s been in the works for years; back when John and Thug first met, a source once told The Fader, “It’s all the instrumental, the guitar, piano; and Thug is not rapping, he’s singing. It’s really ambient and amazing.” The song may have changed since then — and Thug has definitely gone the singing route in the interim — but the “Thug is not rapping, he’s singing” bit doesn’t hold true here. Thug raps; he sings; he makes lovely unidentifiable sounds. You may feel some things.
As Noisey points out, Young Thug’s “Rocket Man” recently made its way onto SoundCloud, and you can hear it below.
