The 2020s File Feature
We Should
"We Should" — Lil Baby and Young Thug's Streetwise Romance in Early 2020 Atlanta's Two Most Distinct Voices The Atlanta rap scene had produced so many distin…
01 The Story
"We Should" — Lil Baby and Young Thug's Streetwise Romance in Early 2020
Atlanta's Two Most Distinct Voices
The Atlanta rap scene had produced so many distinct voices by 2020 that collaboration between its leading figures had become one of the primary modes through which the city's music evolved. When Lil Baby and Young Thug appeared on the same record, the result was a meeting of two artists who shared a geography and an industry but approached their craft from fundamentally different angles. Lil Baby, born Dominique Armani Jones, had risen with remarkable speed, his debut commercial mixtape arriving in 2017 and his star ascending so rapidly that by 2020 he was regarded as one of hip-hop's central figures. Young Thug, born Jeffery Lamar Williams, had been reshaping the melodic possibilities of rap since the early 2010s, building a body of work that influenced nearly every subsequent wave of Atlanta artists, Lil Baby among them.
Hearing them together on "We Should" was less a collision of styles than a conversation between an innovator and one of his most successful artistic descendants. The song appeared on Lil Baby's project My Turn, released in late February 2020, an album that would become one of the most commercially successful rap releases of the year.
My Turn and Its Moment
My Turn arrived in the window just before the pandemic changed everything about how music was received and consumed. Its commercial run therefore occupied an unusual transitional position: it launched with conventional promotional infrastructure intact, then rode a massive streaming surge as the lockdown period sent audiences toward new music at extraordinary volume. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and generated substantial Hot 100 activity as listeners worked through its track list.
"We Should" entered the Billboard Hot 100 on March 14, 2020, debuting and peaking at position 91, spending one week on the chart. The timing placed it at the precise boundary of the pre-pandemic and pandemic periods, one of the last weeks before the full commercial infrastructure of the music industry shifted in response to public health restrictions. The song's chart appearance represented the mass album streaming event that accompanied My Turn's continued momentum in its early weeks.
The Sound and the Collaboration
What "We Should" offers is the kind of relaxed, unhurried collaboration that works best when neither artist is performing effort. Lil Baby's delivery by 2020 had developed a confidence that did not require aggressive display; he could make a point quietly and trust the production to carry the weight. Young Thug, always melodically inventive, brought his characteristic approach to pitch and rhythm that remains difficult to categorize within conventional rap frameworks. The two occupied the track without crowding each other, finding a shared emotional register around the theme of relationship and desire that the song explores.
The production context of My Turn was collaborative across the board, involving multiple producers working toward a consistent sonic vision. The album's sound was grounded in Atlanta trap conventions while incorporating the melodic sensibility that both featured artists had developed as a central part of their respective styles. "We Should" sits comfortably within that framework, a track that benefits from the album's overall coherence.
Lil Baby in 2020 and Beyond
The commercial success of My Turn established Lil Baby's position at the very center of hip-hop in a way that no previous project had fully achieved. The album's long chart run, sustained through the lockdown months, demonstrated an audience depth that went beyond casual interest. Songs like "We Should," collaborative tracks that might otherwise be considered deep cuts, accumulated streaming totals that reflected genuine repeated engagement from a dedicated listener base.
Young Thug's contribution to the track is a reminder of the degree to which his influence on contemporary Atlanta rap was structural rather than merely stylistic. His presence on the song functioned simultaneously as a collaboration and as an acknowledgment of lineage, two artists from the same city at different points in a continuous creative tradition. Press play and hear what that tradition sounds like when it converses with itself.
"We Should" — Lil Baby and Young Thug's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
"We Should" — Desire, Restraint, and the Grammar of Atlanta Romance
A Different Mode of Vulnerability
Hip-hop's relationship with romantic expression has always been more complex than the genre's critics tend to acknowledge. Alongside the more frequently cited postures of toughness and competitive assertion, a quieter tradition of direct emotional expression runs through the music, particularly in the melodic rap that Atlanta refined into its most distinctive export. "We Should" belongs to that tradition, approaching romantic feeling with the kind of directness that requires a certain confidence to deploy without self-consciousness.
The title's grammatical construction is worth noting. "We should" is not a declaration or a boast; it is a suggestion, tentative and forward-looking, leaving space for the other person to accept or decline. That humility in framing places the song in a different emotional register than the more assertive romantic modes common in commercial rap. The narrator here is not claiming; he is proposing. The distinction matters because it reveals something about the emotional architecture the song is building.
The Vocabulary of Millennial and Gen Z Romance
Both Lil Baby and Young Thug emerged from generations that had developed new grammars for expressing romantic interest, shaped by text messages, social media dynamics, and a general cultural shift toward casualness in initial expression. The language of contemporary desire, as these artists render it, tends toward understatement. Grand declarations are coded as inauthentic or performative; the real thing sounds more offhand, more oblique, more like a DM than a sonnet.
"We Should" captures that vocabulary precisely. The song does not escalate into protestation or intensity; it stays within the register of restrained desire, the feeling of wanting something and expressing it without fully committing to the vulnerability that open expression would require. That emotional position is instantly recognizable to listeners who have navigated the specific dance of contemporary romantic communication, which may explain part of the song's appeal to its primary audience.
Two Voices, One Emotional Register
The collaboration between Lil Baby and Young Thug on this track is interesting partly because both artists bring their own relationship to melodic expression. Young Thug had spent years exploring the boundary between singing and rapping, developing a vocal approach that treats pitch as a flexible tool rather than a fixed parameter. Lil Baby adopted elements of that melodic sensibility into his own style, making his delivery warmer and more emotionally expansive than the harder trap modes he could also access. On "We Should," both artists operate in their melodic registers, creating a consistency of emotional tone across the song that a more stylistically contrasting pairing might not have achieved.
Context and Cultural Significance
The Atlanta rap scene's ongoing influence on popular music by 2020 was so substantial that its emotional conventions had become something close to national ones, at least among younger listeners. The specific way that Atlanta artists expressed romantic feeling, the particular blend of confidence and casualness, of directness and understatement, had become the dominant mode across much of commercial hip-hop and the R&B that existed in its orbit.
"We Should" is a compact demonstration of that influence made concrete. Two of the scene's key figures, one of them foundational and one currently ascending, sharing a track that exemplifies the emotional grammar they had collectively helped establish. The song's brief chart moment captured that dynamic at a specific instant, before the year that contained it became as historically significant as 2020 ultimately did. What remained was the music: clean, direct, and entirely of its moment.
"We Should" — Lil Baby and Young Thug's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
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