There was no tour. When Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan released their collaborative mixtape Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 — its 10th anniversary is Saturday — they also announced a haphazardly routed set of shows that would supposedly take them across the basketball arenas of the Southeastern United States. One problem: Those tour dates were not real. In between tracks on Tha Tour Pt. 1, DJ Swamp Izzo shouts that “the dates are locked in.” The dates were not locked in. None of the venues had even been contacted. The tour of Tha Tour was pure fantasy.
How does that happen? How do you announce a tour that does not exist while promoting that tour with one of the greatest mixtapes in rap history? It’s a mystery, and it will remain a mystery. Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 works best in shadow. When they came together for this mixtape, Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan, friends since middle school, were both ascendant voices in the fertile, competitive world of Atlanta rap. Both of them came from the criminal underworld, and both signed all sorts of unwise label deals in their younger days; lawyers would spend years disentangling them from their various contracts.
For one brief and perfect moment, Cash Money overlord Birdman brought those two rappers together over a series of gorgeous beats from up-and-coming Atlanta producers, giving himself equal billing in the process even though he plays a strictly supporting role on the tape itself. It’s a chaotic piece of music, haphazardly recorded and assembled, but it taps into a gorgeous vein of explosive creativity, leaving us with a no-shit rap masterpiece. The tour never happened, and everything fell apart immediately afterward. But for this astonishing 20-song stretch, Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan danced on air.
Even if the people who made Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 all continued to flourish today, this anniversary would make me feel some type of way. Today, a decade later, the rap world still pretty much revolves around Atlanta, and the flows, patterns, melodies, production, and subject matter of the city’s biggest trap hits haven’t changed much. You can love a record like Future’s new Mixtape Pluto while still acknowledging that its pleasures are dependent on your fondness for what Future did in the ’10s. People continue to make good music, but that music rarely surprises. This was not the case when Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 came out. Instead, the tape sounds like the work of two wildly talented voices still in the process of discovering what they can do, where they can go. It’s a historic record of a fleeting moment when anything seemed possible. That’s not the case anymore. It hasn’t been the case in so long.
The people who made Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 do not continue to flourish today. After the tape’s release, Young Thug went on to achieve mainstream rap stardom, something that once seemed impossible for a stylist as abstract and unorthodox as him, but he’s now fighting for his life in court. Prosecutors argue that YSL, Thug’s label and rap crew, is actually a gang and that Thug is really a criminal kingpin playing dress-up as a rap star. He’s been locked up for more than two years — first waiting through endless trial delays, then dealing with the endless trial itself. We still have no idea how his story will conclude. With Rich Homie Quan, we know. Rich Homie made a few hits after Tha Tour Pt. 1, but his decline in relevance was steep, and his addiction issues were bad. Just a few weeks ago, Rich Homie Quan died at the age of 34. He didn’t survive to see this anniversary.
The moment that their paths aligned, Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan were both on meteoric upward trajectories. Both represented a scrappy Atlanta underground that still seemed self-evidently inferior to plenty of rap-traditionalist types, and both wore obvious influences like Lil Wayne and Future on their sleeves. If you were paying attention, though, both of them represented creativity and excitement. Young Thug released his first I Came From Nothing mixtape in 2011, came up through Gucci Mane’s 1017 Bricksquad crew, and broke out with frantic, gibbering street hits like “Stoner” and “Danny Glover.” He was all elbows and angles. You could never follow his thought processes, and he was almost impossibly compelling, a puzzle that resisted all solutions.
By contrast, Rich Homie Quan’s come-up was conventional, almost pedestrian. A former high-school baseball prospect who’s done a few months in prison on a burglary charge, Rich Homie started dropping mixtapes in 2012 and, like Thug, found his way into Gucci Mane’s orbit. He arrived fully formed in the public eye with the 2013 single “Type Of Way,” a viral and regional hit that transitioned into mainstream status soon after the Michigan State Spartans adapted it as their fight song. The video of Rich Homie and the Spartans dancing to “Type Of Way” in the locker room after their Rose Bowl victory is a relic of an older, better internet. You couldn’t plan or quantify that kind of impact. Rich Homie went on to sing-rap stealthy-sticky hooks on a bunch of other people’s hits. For a minute there, Rich Homie Quan’s voice was simply a thing that you experienced in the world, like sunshine or ambient depression.
In the great but short-lived Young Thug/Rich Homie Quan partnership, “Lifestyle” came first. Thug and Rich Homie were already apparently considering some kind of collaborative project before Birdman brought the two of them together under the Cash Money umbrella, stamping them with “Rich Gang,” a name that he’d used for a random, forgettable 2013 compilation. Both rappers already had complicated label entanglements, but Birdman saw the two of them as the future of Cash Money Records, the brand that he’d been building for two decades. In June 2014, Thug and Rich Homie joined forced for “Lifestyle,” a magnetic and ebullient celebration of struggle and triumph. The two sounded like magic together. With Rich Homie Quan around, Young Thug was more focused and melodic, capable of belting out a euphoric hook that could live in your head all day. With Young Thug around, Rich Homie Quan was looser and more adventurous, his verses crackling with uncontainable excitement. They energized and galvanized each other, and “Lifestyle” soon blew up even bigger than any of the two rappers’ previous hits.
The Young Thug/Rich Homie Quan dynamic carried through to their joint appearance on Travis Scott’s “Mamacita” soon afterward, and it somehow sustained itself for an hour-plus on the Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 mixtape. In the mixtape’s distorted sound, you can practically smell the late-night studio sessions. On the tape, both rappers lock in over a series of floaty, insinuating beats from hungry young producers like London On Da Track and Wheezy, letting energy and ideas flow between them. Many of the tracks on the tape are essentially solo showcases for one rapper, but you can always sense the presence of the other just out of frame. On the tape, Thug and Rich Homie rap about each other with friends-for-life devotion that probably helped fuel the gay-panic rumors that always seemed to fly around both of them, Thug in particular. They didn’t care. They loved each other.
Birdman’s contributions to Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 were largely peripheral: A couple of not-bad verses, a fun opening monologue about “marble floors, gold terlets, and chandeliers,” a catchy “Rich Gang” ad-lib that seems to run on loop through the whole tape. But the spotlight belongs to Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan, who push each other to strange new realms. Even to day, it’s hard to describe what makes their work on the tape so special. It’s not exactly the lyrics, which never look all that impressive on paper. It’s not exactly the melodies, which sparkle and sidle but which rarely bring the obvious immediacy of a great pop hook. Instead, it’s the kinetic energy at work — the way the voices shift back and forth, the raw ache when Rich Homie Quan moans that he just wants to live, the way the phrase “sex on a boat” seems to leap out of Young Thug’s throat.
The sheer abundance of Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 is a key part of its power. Thug and Rich Homie sound like they could rap together forever. Their songs together aren’t usually structured or thought-out. Instead, they seem to respond to each other’s vibrations. The tape captures them deep in a mutual flow that feels inexhaustible. Guests like PeeWee Longway, Jacquees, and the late Nipsey Hussle seem to pick up on that flow and lock right into it, at least for a verse at a time. The tape ends suddenly when the 20th track “Who’s On Top” cuts off mid-sentence — as if these two were recording on actual audio tape and they finally ran out of space. It seems like it could keep going, but no. The end was the end.
Nothing lasts. We never got a tour or a Pt. 2. A few months after the mixtape came out, Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan fell out with one another for reasons that remain mysterious to those of us outside their inner circles. Young Thug’s career shot upward, while Rich Homie Quan treaded water for a while and then sank. Thug’s artistic descendants proliferated, and some of them even found a little of the chemistry that he and Rich Homie had on Tha Tour Pt. 1. I heard some of their spirit at work in the music that Lil Baby and Gunna made together, but that duo didn’t last, either. Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 never got a proper release. With sites like DatPiff blinking out of existence, the music is harder to access today than it was a decade ago; you mostly have to rely on YouTube rips or the Internet Archive. Shortly before his passing, Rich Homie Quan spoke hopefully about the idea that he and Thug might some day release some of the music that they left in the vault, but who even knows now.
Still, that evanescent quality is one of the things that makes Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 so special. The creation of a tape like that is a mysterious, disorderly thing. For whatever reason, these two voices found each other at the perfect time, and they made something that can never be recaptured or remade. Lightning struck, and we got to watch it light up the sky. To play Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 today is to point at the charred spot on the ground and to reminisce on how loud the thunder was. The miracle happens in the moment, and then the moment passes by. Gold terlets may tarnish, but they can gleam in your memory forever.
