The synergy proved too tempting to resist. The lyric in ‘Rocket Man’ is, ‘and I’m gonna be high.'” I was trying to find a lyric that would align with his world, and at the time, he was talking about putting out an album named HiTunes. “‘Bennie and the Jets,’ ‘Tiny Dancer’ - these are out of the context of Young Thug. “A lot of Bernie Taupin’s lyrics just don’t make sense for Young Thug,” Phili says. “I intentionally tried to avoid ‘Rocket Man’ - it’s one of his most famous songs it’s untouchable.”īut his research hit a wall.
“I read the lyrics to almost every single Elton song,” Phili says. So the A&R suggested that sampling John might be a safer bet. John has collaborated with rappers before - for example, he is credited on A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service - but Ogunlesi wasn’t sure about the feasibility of getting the busy star in the same room as his mercurial rapper.
“ He reached out to me like, ‘wouldn’t it be crazy if you did an Elton John-Young Thug song?'” Ogunlesi remembers. Phili is a producer best known for his work with A$AP Ferg, and he was already in touch with Young Thug’s A&R, Geoff Ogunlesi of 300 Entertainment, about a different record. In December 2015, Stelios Phili stumbled across a Noisey article in which Elton John asserted his love for Young Thug. “High” is the result of a what-if thought experiment. An official version finally arrived when On the Rvn came out Sunday at midnight, roughly two weeks after it was promised, amid the latest period of instability for Young Thug, who was arrested earlier this month on felony drug charges.
A version of “High” leaked online in August, more than two years later. Rumors about the possibility of a collaboration with John started circulating early in 2016 after the two artists met in Atlanta and photos of the pair appeared on Instagram. You may feel some things.Īs Noisey points out, Young Thug’s “Rocket Man” recently made its way onto SoundCloud, and you can hear it below.Young Thug saves the best for last on his new EP: The final track, “High,” is a striking, AutoTune-slathered duet between the rapper and Elton John, whose voice is imported via a sample of the classic hit “Rocket Man.”įervent Young Thug fans - is there any other kind? - have been waiting impatiently for this song to surface. Thug raps he sings he makes lovely unidentifiable sounds. 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. 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.
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. They met the following year, after which Thug and Wyclef Jean teamed up on a song alternately titled “Elton” and “Elton John.”Īnd now there’s this. John expressed his admiration for Young Thug back in 2015. This isn’t the first interaction between the two music legends. Today we get to hear one intriguing artifact from those archives: a song billed as Thugger’s remix of Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” 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.
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