YOUNG THUG TELLS ROLLING STONE ABOUT HIS CHILDHOOD

Young Thug isn’t quick to open up. When I spent time around him for this Complex cover story, he did very little talking. As the 23-year-old Atlanta rapper gets more famous he’s seeing more attention, more interview requests, and more people trying to learn about his life. We still don’t know his whole story, but we’re finding things out piece by piece. In a new story for Rolling Stone, he gives a little insight into his childhood. An excerpt:

“I was in the streets at eight, nine years old. I was going to school so my dad and mom would keep buying me clothes, but when I got out I did what I wanted to do—fighting, all kinds of shit.”

A few years later, after a dispute over Thug’s classroom antics turned physical, he got kicked out of middle school. “I broke my teacher’s arm,” he says matter-of-factly. “Took his ass out. Pussy-ass nigga.” He spent the next four years in a harsh juvenile-detention program. “Seven in the morning to six in the afternoon,” he says. “No windows or nothing, like a real jail. Lot of punishment. I didn’t do shit there but gamble, smoke and fuck.”