The System: Zak Cheney-Rice

Why Young Thug? How one of the hottest rap stars became the face of urban crime.

JEFFERY WILLIAMS was born in 1991, the year after Atlanta won its bid to host the 1996 Olympic Games. He grew up in the Jonesboro South projects in a desolate corner of the city, "a forgotten place among a series of forgotten places on the south side," King Williams, a documentary filmmaker, told me. Jeffery's childhood experiences were as grim as they were indelible: He was the second-youngest of 11 children and watched his elder brother Bennie get murdered in front of him over a gambling dispute. He has rapped about how his dad shot his mom and her lover when he caught her cheating, and he sold drugs to make ends meet.

Jonesboro South and its adjacent stretch of Cleveland Avenue were where Williams found music. As a kid growing up in the 1990s and early aughts, he saw Atlanta's rise to rap dominance firsthand, an explosion sparked by OutKast's triumph at the 1995 Source Awards. "The South got something to say," declared André 3000 from the stage, a rebuke to the bicoastal sniping that had consumed rap in the Death Rowversus-Bad Boy era. The flamboyant André became a stylistic forebear for Williams, who, as a budding rapper himself, would adopt the handle Young Thug. For the cover of his 2016 mixtape, Jeffery, which charted at No. 8 on "The Billboard 200" and made several end-of-year lists, he posed in a ruffled dress that drew plaudits from music journalists and ridicule from peers.