Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. Thank you for watching. Let's take a serious tone. Let's go in a serious direction in this video and talk about the most consequential music news of the week. That would be the ending of the Young Thug, YSL, RICO trial. Technically, the entire thing is not completely over as of this point because there are still individuals being prosecuted who are in the YSL orbit.

For those who need a refresher, it was actually over two years ago at this point, that Young Thug was arrested under these charges. Since then, he has racked up 56 felony counts. According to NPR, Young Thug and his lawyers taking a blind plea deal here basically brings to a close the longest-running criminal trial in Georgia history. The plea deal he took here did require him to take ownership of the crimes he was being accused of. Him returning home also requires him to be on probation for a period of 15 years.

Depending on Georgia or Fulton County laws, what was negotiated in order to get this deal, those probation rules that Thugger is being subjected to could be a lot of different things. They could be super, super, super restrictive. I mean, I know, according to NPR, one detail of Thugger's probation is that he is not allowed, apparently, to be in the Metro Atlanta area for a period of a decade. Then later down the road, he could or could not end up being in the state's custody for a period of 20 years or so, depending on how his probation period goes.

So again, Young Thug is not being ruled as innocent here. He is not being totally let off the hook. Essentially, what he's being handed in this instance is a second chance, a second opportunity to just go a different path and take a different approach. How exactly we got here through plea negotiations is not well known at this point. Young Thugs' lawyers haven't exactly made public what exactly they did or said in order to pull the state in this direction. A whole host of things could have been promised that down the road could later come to light. But as of right now, they seem to, despite Young Thug's plea deal, still be taking a very staunch approach in terms of feeling he was innocent of the crimes he was accused of.

In fact, they've stated publicly that they feel like them bringing RICO charges in this case was an abuse of the law, essentially treating Young Thug as if he was the head of a drug cartel or Al Capone or something like that. While it may be true that Young Thug wasn't necessarily on that level of kingpinism or criminal activity, the influential position that he was in certainly put him within proximity of a lot of criminal acts.

For a while in the midst of this trial, it was not looking good for Jeffrey because these sorts of criminal activities were seeping into the legal proceedings themselves. There was the infamous drug exchange that went on during one of the trial days. There was also the Gunna Plea deal that framed YSL as a gang, a collective, a syndicate of sorts, which I feel like the only reason they gave him that deal was to get him on record admitting what the state wanted to paint YSL as in order to further justify the the RICO approach here. Because, again, I'm sure they were crimes, and I'm sure they were felonies that the state only would have been able to charge Young Thug for if it was done under RICO because they're essentially arguing, 'Okay, this one guy who's a part of a syndicate of people did this thing so we can pin it on the person who is the head of the whole group or the leader.'

If you guys also remember, there was a point where it was decided that the court was going to start admitting song lyrics as evidence into the trial, something we've talked about numerous times on this channel as being a horrendous direction for things to go in legally because song lyrics and song lyrics alone should not be used as evidence of a crime. Then also in what was probably the most ridiculous display across this entire trial, YSL lawyer Nicole Fagan got arrested for fucking evidence tampering, and also for her connections to, apparently, a 2022 shooting. For a second, Austen and I considered doing a video on this woman, and we didn't. All you need to do is look at photos of this woman to know that there is something seriously wrong going on upstairs with her.

So again, Young Thug's lawyers were not given an easy task here if essentially their mission was to argue to the judge that 'This web of criminal activity, my client has nothing to do with it or the connections are loose at best', and yet you're just being followed by this web of criminal activity.

With Young Thug being let off on probation here, he did make some closing remarks. There was an exchange between him and the judge, and the whole thing just read as an indictment of rap culture. It seemed like that was more the focus than how grave this single man's crimes were or could have possibly been, which, honestly, if that is truly the concern, that is not something for the courts to fix or to deal with. That is always going to be the slowest and worst and most ineffective way of nipping that thing in the bud.

Not only because, one, at this point, I don't think Young Thug has the command over the youngest and most impressionable listeners within the music world, within the hip hop world at this point. He's been around for well over a decade now. He's a veteran of the game at the moment, at least in terms of rappers who broke in the 2010s. And in the wake of this trial, you've had the rise of drill and a whole new generation of rappers that are saying things that are actually more explicit, more violent, and more off the rails than almost anything Young Thug used to say in a lot of his older and classic tracks. So the idea that you're going to change hearts and minds and clean things up by bringing this one dude to justice and making him do some community service and having him do a speech in front of a judge. It's a fool's errand.

And plus, also, this is just so goddamn downstream. A lot of the issues and problems that create the world a Young Thug grew up in, they're systematic. You can't reverse or fix these trends by putting one single rapper on trial and making him say sorry in front of the world and to tell everybody that he's going to do things differently and fly right now. If you actually want to impact this stuff broadly, you've got to talk about upending systematic racism, poverty, drug war policies, school-to-prison pipelines, punishing people, and punishing the world into good behavior has been proven time and time and time again, statistically, to just not be that effective.

I mean, look, at the end of the day, Young Thug really got out of this whole thing by the skin of his teeth. It was not looking pretty for a minute there. And hopefully, he can get through this probation period without any hitches or anything going on. Because truth be told, between his music career, between his family, between his kids, he does certainly have a lot to live for. He does certainly have a lot to maintain his freedom for. Even if his career at this point is not the hot commodity that it was about six years ago, he still has a lot of gas left in the tank. He still has a lot of influence in his return to music, officially making some new stuff, touring, all that is going to be grand and widely publicized.

I'm going to leave it there. I'm going to leave it at that. What do you guys think of any of this? All of this down in the comments, let me know.

Anthony Fantano. Young Thug. Forever.