The 2010s File Feature
Chanel (Go Get It)
Chanel (Go Get It): Young Thug, Gunna, and Lil Baby Converge on a Trap Anthem "Chanel (Go Get It)" arrived in the summer of 2018 as a concentrated display of…
01 The Story
Chanel (Go Get It): Young Thug, Gunna, and Lil Baby Converge on a Trap Anthem
"Chanel (Go Get It)" arrived in the summer of 2018 as a concentrated display of the Atlanta trap ecosystem at a moment of generational transition. Young Thug, the movement's most idiosyncratic architect, recruited two proteges, Gunna and Lil Baby, whose combined momentum was already reshaping the commercial landscape of rap. The song premiered as part of a broader wave of collaborative releases that Young Thug orchestrated under his YSL Records imprint, and its chart appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 underscored the growing institutional power of the Atlanta school of melody-driven trap.
Young Thug, born Jeffery Lamar Williams in Atlanta, Georgia, had by 2018 spent roughly five years dismantling conventional expectations about how a rapper should sound. His debut commercial mixtape Barter 6 in 2015 and subsequent releases demonstrated a restless willingness to treat his voice as a melodic instrument, bending syllables and stretching vowels in ways that influenced an entire generation of younger artists. By the time "Chanel (Go Get It)" surfaced, he was simultaneously a critical darling and a commercial force, the rare artist who managed to occupy both positions without compromise.
Gunna, born Sergio Giavanni Kitchens, had been operating in Young Thug's orbit since the mid-2010s, releasing projects under YSL Records' umbrella and building a devoted streaming audience. His Drip Season 3 project in 2018 had already demonstrated his capacity for generating strong streaming numbers, and his appearance on "Chanel (Go Get It)" extended that momentum. Lil Baby, born Dominique Armani Jones, had taken a particularly steep trajectory, having only begun rapping professionally in 2017 at the encouragement of Quality Control Music executive Kevin "Coach K" Lee. By mid-2018, Lil Baby's debut studio album Harder Than Ever had debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, establishing him as a commercial entity of the first order.
The production underlying "Chanel (Go Get It)" exemplifies the melodic trap aesthetic that dominated Atlanta's export to mainstream radio during this period. The beat, built on layered synthesizer textures and punchy 808 sub-bass patterns, creates a luxurious atmosphere that matches the aspirational imagery embedded in the track's title. The invocation of Chanel as a signifier was entirely consistent with the fashion-forward sensibility that Young Thug had long cultivated, a sensibility that blurred gender norms in both his wardrobe choices and his musical persona.
The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 78 on September 1, 2018, representing the combined streaming strength of all three participating artists. During this period, streaming had become the dominant driver of Hot 100 chart positions, and a track featuring three artists each commanding tens of millions of Spotify and Apple Music streams could enter the chart immediately upon release without requiring substantial radio airplay. The track's peak position of 78 reflected the relatively specialist nature of its appeal, drawing deeply from the trap fanbase without crossing significantly into pop radio territory.
The chart trajectory told a straightforward story of streaming-driven entry followed by gradual decline. After debuting at 78, the song moved to 81 in its second week, then to 90 in its third week, before returning briefly to the chart at 94 several weeks later. This pattern, strong at entry then declining without radio support, was characteristic of many trap releases of the era that relied primarily on devoted streaming audiences rather than mass-market radio promotion.
The YouTube video for "Chanel (Go Get It)" accumulated over 41 million views, reflecting the ongoing importance of the video platform for reaching the younger demographic that constituted the core trap audience. The video's visual language deployed luxury goods, expensive automobiles, and the kind of aspirational imagery that had become standard in the visual grammar of Atlanta trap, while also showcasing the distinctive style choices that made Young Thug's visual identity immediately recognizable.
From a broader cultural perspective, "Chanel (Go Get It)" documented a specific moment of succession in Atlanta rap. Young Thug was simultaneously functioning as a creative peer and a mentor figure to Gunna and Lil Baby, lending his institutional credibility to artists who would go on to surpass him in mainstream commercial terms. Lil Baby in particular would spend the following years building one of the most consistent commercial track records in contemporary rap, and looking back at "Chanel (Go Get It)" provides a useful early snapshot of the chemistry between these three figures.
The song's place in the YSL Records story is also significant. Young Thug's label had by 2018 become one of the most influential imprints in trap music, and "Chanel (Go Get It)" represented a collaborative statement of the label's identity, its commitment to melodic trap aesthetics, luxury iconography, and the cultivation of closely connected artist networks. This model of interlocked artist relationships, where featured appearances serve as platforms for label-wide brand building, was central to the commercial strategy of YSL Records and Quality Control Music during the late 2010s.
In the years following the track's release, the trajectories of all three artists continued upward, though through different paths. Young Thug's So Much Fun in 2019 became his first number-one album on the Billboard 200. Gunna released multiple commercially successful projects. Lil Baby became arguably the most commercially dominant rapper of the early 2020s. "Chanel (Go Get It)" now functions as an artifact of the moment before each of those trajectories reached their apex, capturing three careers in coordinated ascent.
Recording and Production Context
The recording of "Chanel (Go Get It)" took place within the densely collaborative environment that characterized Atlanta's studio culture during the late 2010s. Young Thug, Gunna, and Lil Baby frequently recorded in proximity to one another, and the vocal performances on the track carry the loose, improvisational energy that emerges from artists who are genuinely comfortable in each other's creative presence. The production reflects the contributions of beatmakers deeply embedded in the Atlanta sound, deploying the synthesizer stabs and hi-hat patterns that had become signature elements of melodic trap.
The song's release strategy was consistent with how YSL Records and its affiliates managed drops in the streaming era, releasing tracks with minimal advance promotion and relying on the combined social media reach of the artists involved to generate initial streaming velocity. This approach proved effective at generating Hot 100 entries but limited long-term chart performance compared to tracks backed by sustained radio campaigns.
02 Song Meaning
Luxury, Loyalty, and the Aspirational Grammar of "Chanel (Go Get It)"
"Chanel (Go Get It)" operates within a thematic framework that is among the most persistent in contemporary trap music: the use of high-fashion brand names as shorthand for achieved status, personal transformation, and the distance traveled from economic precarity. The title's deployment of Chanel, one of the world's most recognized luxury fashion houses, is not decorative. It functions as a coordinates system, placing the song's speakers at a specific point on the map of social aspiration, and inviting listeners who share that aspiration to identify with the perspective being articulated.
The phrase "go get it" attached to the brand name is equally deliberate. Where simply naming a luxury brand might read as boastful display, the addition of "go get it" introduces an active, motivational dimension. The track frames luxury acquisition not merely as an achieved state but as an ongoing practice, a discipline that requires relentless pursuit. This transforms what might otherwise be pure conspicuous consumption into something closer to a motivational philosophy, the idea that status symbols are the natural reward for relentless ambition.
Young Thug's particular contribution to this thematic territory involves the gender fluidity with which he approaches luxury signifiers. Chanel is historically associated with women's fashion, and Young Thug's comfort with that association, his refusal to restrict aspirational luxury imagery to conventionally masculine categories of goods, was by 2018 a well-established component of his public identity. This nuance adds a layer of complexity to the song's engagement with luxury iconography that distinguishes it from more straightforwardly masculine displays of material wealth.
Gunna and Lil Baby each contribute verses that extend the track's core themes while inflecting them with their individual stylistic signatures. Gunna's approach to the luxury-aspiration theme tends toward the sensual and atmospheric, foregrounding the textural pleasures of expensive things rather than their competitive social meaning. Lil Baby's verses bring a more explicitly autobiographical energy, grounding the aspiration in the specific experience of a young man from Atlanta's Westside navigating a world of sudden material abundance after years of scarcity.
The song also participates in a broader conversation about loyalty and collective advancement that runs through trap music as a genre. The YSL Records collective, and the interconnected ecosystem of Atlanta artists operating across YSL and Quality Control, embody a model of communal success in which individual achievement is inseparable from loyalty to one's creative and personal network. "Chanel (Go Get It)" reflects this ethos in the collaborative structure of the track itself, three artists who genuinely share a social world and creative vision building a song together that amplifies each individual's brand while reinforcing their collective identity.
Compositionally, the track exemplifies what critics and music scholars identified during the late 2010s as the "melodic trap" aesthetic, a synthesis that departed significantly from the rhythmically rigid, verbally dense tradition of earlier Atlanta rap. All three performers lean heavily on melodic inflection, treating their voices as instruments capable of carrying emotional and atmospheric weight independent of the literal meaning of their words. This approach to rap vocal performance, which Young Thug did as much as anyone to popularize, creates a listening experience in which mood and texture are as communicatively important as explicit lyrical content.
The cultural impact of tracks like "Chanel (Go Get It)" extended beyond the songs themselves to influence how a generation of young artists thought about fashion, aspiration, and the relationship between personal style and creative identity. Young Thug's particular brand of boundary-crossing luxury aesthetics, in which high fashion items traditionally associated with women were incorporated freely into a masculine creative persona, helped expand the cultural space available to younger artists who felt constrained by conventional gender expectations in hip-hop. This legacy is visible in the subsequent work of artists across multiple genres who cite Young Thug's fearlessness as an enabling precedent.
The track also illustrates how the streaming era changed the relationship between commercial success and cultural influence. "Chanel (Go Get It)" reached a peak of number 78 on the Billboard Hot 100, a relatively modest chart position by conventional standards. Yet its cumulative streaming numbers and its role in documenting a significant moment in the evolution of the Atlanta rap ecosystem give it a cultural weight that far exceeds what that chart position might suggest. In the streaming era, the old metrics of chart performance as a proxy for cultural importance have become increasingly unreliable, and tracks like "Chanel (Go Get It)" demonstrate that impact can be substantial even when peak chart positions are limited.
The song's enduring resonance comes from its function as a document of creative community, three artists at different but related points in their development articulating a shared vision of ambition, loyalty, and the pursuit of beauty in material form. That combination of themes, aspirational, communal, and aesthetically adventurous, gives "Chanel (Go Get It)" a significance that outlasts its chart run.
→ More from the 2010s File
View all 2010s hits →
Keep digging