Young Thug Sends Snakes to Music Mags and Media

[Ax01]

ok so rapper Young Thug recently sent pet snakes (complete w/ handlers/delivery guys and enclosures) as gifts to music tabloids like Spin, Billboard, XXL, etc. etc. it was a "creative" promo for his upcoming mix-tape titled Slime Language. at least one media outlet (NPR) refused delivery.

looks like he sent Rough Green Snakes. cute and simple enough and they feed on bugs like crickets. a pretty cool idea that got his name in the news but still a crazy thing to do.



here's the write-up from Spin: https://www.spin.com/2018/08/young-thug-snakes

Now We Have to Take Care of This Snake

In a possibly ill-considered promotional push for his forthcoming mixtape Slime Language, Young Thug (or his management, or whoever) arranged for the delivery of live snakes to several music media outlets today. The one that showed up at Spin’s office, technically addressed to our colleagues at Billboard, is named “Digits.” It is tiny, and green, and now lives in a terrarium that sits on top of a cabinet where people generally put all the unsolicited swag they get in the mail. Unlike the sad self-released CDs piled up next to it, the snake requires food to survive. Specifically crickets, several of which were hopping around in there when the snake handlers arrived to deliver it this morning. There’s a lamp on top of the tank, which is apparently meant to keep it properly warm, but at the moment it’s not turned on for some reason. Word around the office is that Digits is a girl snake. Someone here is going to have to take care of her until she dies.

I don’t need to be morbid. And it’s not that we at Spin don’t have faith in the reptile-nurturing abilities of our fellow music journalists. But nobody here asked for Digits, just like nobody at XXL asked for their snake (named “Sex“), and nobody at NPR Music asked for their snake (“Liger“), and nobody at Complex asked for their snake (“Eww,” clearly the best snake name). We’re all professionals with busy schedules, and it just seems pretty likely that some news editor somewhere is going to forget about a scheduled cricket breakfast sooner or later.

These snakes remind me of the time an old colleague gave another old colleague a couple of cockatiels as a sort of gag gift, and the second colleague’s entirely reasonable reaction was to be pissed as hell. Because now he had take care of these screaming, needy birds. And now we have to take care of this snake.

She is pretty cute, though.

a f/u article on their snake: https://www.yahoo.com/news/checking-...173457323.html

Checking In on Young Thug’s Media Snakes, 24 Hours Later

“The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra. And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.” – Isaiah 11:8

Like a vengeful deity testing the loyalty of his subjects, Young Thug cursed music media this week with a plague of vicious serpents. Just kidding! The little guys were sent to various outlets as promotion for Thug’s upcoming mixtape Slime Language, and they’re super cute. One’s in our office right now, sent to our colleagues at Billboard: a whip-thin tangle of bright green scales who seems uninterested in anything other than munching on crickets and basking under the heat lamp. Her name is Digits.

Sending snakes named after your own songs to media companies is obviously an awesome flex on any rapper’s part. But it raises some logistical and ethical questions. Editorial teams are busy enough; who has time to take care of a snake? According to wildlife control site CritterControl, pet snakes live 20 to 30 years if properly cared for. Will music media even exist for that long? Will the snakes eventually be given editorial responsibilities after a future round of layoffs? What will cricket prices look like once the water wars get started?

We reached out to publications who received the reptiles to check up on how they’re preparing for the long haul.

“People were surprised to see the box show up,” said Mass Appeal staffer Kyle Petreycik. But everyone “calmed down once we got Freaky on-boarded.” Now the company plans on keeping the snake full time. They’ve set Freaky’s terrarium up on a desk (see below) in the video editing room. The staff have adopted a feeding rotation: 25 crickets a week. Petreycik himself fed Freaky five crickets this morning. He describes the snake as “cool, calm, and collected,” if “slightly anti-social.”

The staff at the Fader weren’t as enthusiastic. “Mixed emotions,” said Editor-in-Chief Duncan Cooper, describing his staff’s response to their scaly delivery (which didn’t come with a name tag, unlike others). PETA, if you’re reading this, don’t freak out: one merciful Fader staffer offered to care for the snake themselves. “Someone who is happy about the snake is texting their roommate to ask if it’s ok if they have a snake now,” Cooper said. “Update, their roommate is happy too,” he added a few minutes later. Asked for his thoughts on the ethics of using live animals as album promo, Cooper sent SPIN a link to this incredibly evocative cartoon. “Everyone is happy now it has a loving home,” he concluded.

No “animals that slither along on their bellies” (Leviticus 11:42) ever made it inside One World Trade Center, home of Pitchfork. “We politely declined the offer,” said Pitchfork Senior Editor Jeremy Larson.

Snake mail has taken longer to reach Williamsburg. “We haven’t received one, but apparently there’s one on the way,” reports Eric Sundermann, Editor-in-Chief of Vice’s music outlet Noisey, whose office is in the neighborhood. “In terms of what the plan is for taking care of it, I have no idea, as I don’t even know what it is yet. But we’ll definitely make sure it’s properly taken care of.” Hopefully Action Bronson will be kept far away.

On Twitter, NPR Music producer and staff writer Lars Gotrich posted a picture with a snake. “Young Thug sent the @nprmusic office in NYC a snake to promote ‘Slime Language.’ NPR has strong ethics guidelines about gifts of significant value, so we sent it back, but not before I got a pic.” Their commitment to avoiding conflicts of interest is admirable.

https://twitter.com/totalvibration/s...47960809279488

As for Digits, she’s here for the long haul. “Digits stays as long as no one in the office has any objections or complaints about her,” said Billboard hip-hop editor Carl Lamarre. “Digits is a part of the Billboard family and will stay in [VP of content] Ross [Scarano]’s office for the time being. She’s the company pet.”

Digits took some getting used to. “Initially, everyone was scared to hear that we were being given a snake, until they realized how small she actually is,” Lamerre added. “Digits is very shy and timid. She rarely makes appearances and is always hiding.”

All in all, this promotional stunt probably could have gone a lot worse for all involved. Still, we urge rappers in the future to keep our strained budgets and busy workweeks in mind regarding living gifts. Would a succulent plant be so bad?

Edit: here's another article and a vid. looks like he named each of the snakes he sent. the one XXL received was named Sex: http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2018/08/y...uage-tracklist

[Bogertophis]

I hate the idea of any kind of pets being used as promotional props or surprise "gifts"...as mentioned, those refused got further stress, & even being "accepted"
doesn't guarantee they'll be cared for as anything more than a novelty toy...it's just a lousy thing to do, IMO. And someone should tell him that snakes are not
slimy...! I suppose there's always a chance that these snakes will win a few people over, but it's unfair to them if they don't.

[MasonC2K]

I wouldn't want any kind of animal being sent to me without my foreknowledge and consent.

[Ax01]

I wouldn't want any kind of animal being sent to me without my foreknowledge and consent.

oh i agree esp. when we don't want to give those critical of our hobby more ammo. i remember when the repeal on the Lacey Act ban of interstate travel of some big snakes in April of last year, anti-herper pundits freaked out and wrote articles like this: https://www.msn.com/en-in/lifestyle/...-us/ar-BBzDtGd

You Can Now Mail 20-Foot Pythons in U.S.

Gaby Del Valle 11-04-2017

Forget glitter bombs or dog poop. Now you can mail your enemy a huge, man-eating python.

A Washington, D.C., circuit court decided Friday that it is no longer a federal crime to ship both reticulated pythons and green anacondas within the 49 continental states.

Reticulated pythons are the world’s longest snakes and among the three heaviest. These snakes can grow to a length of more than 20 feet and reproduce through a creepy-ass process called “pathogenesis,” which basically means they don’t need to have sex and a bunch of baby snakes hatch from the female’s unfertilized egg.

The pythons paralyze their prey by wrapping themselves around them, squeezing like crazy, then swallowing them whole. They mostly eat prey that’s up to a quarter their own length—so, around five feet, or the height of your average fifth grader. Attacks on humans are “rare,” but just last week, a 23-foot reticulated pythonswallowed a man in Indonesia whole.

Now, let’s say you just want a pet. What do you do when your cute baby anaconda turns into a 400-pound behemoth? Release it into the wild, where it’ll probably eat a deer or something before it gets killed by professional snake hunters. That’s not a joke: every year, disgruntled pet owners release their snakes into the Florida Everglades, and the state’s government pays snake hunters to kill them, as pythons are an invasive species. Earlier this week, hunters wrangled a 15-foot Burmese python, a species that is smaller (yes, smaller) than the reticulated pythons you can now mail to your frenemy in Alaska or wherever.

Well, thank goodness for that. BRB, moving to Hawaii.

I hate the idea of any kind of pets being used as promotional props or surprise "gifts"...as mentioned, those refused got further stress, & even being "accepted"
doesn't guarantee they'll be cared for as anything more than a novelty toy...it's just a lousy thing to do, IMO. And someone should tell him that snakes are not
slimy...! I suppose there's always a chance that these snakes will win a few people over, but it's unfair to them if they don't.

i know! snakes are not slimy! i hate that myth!
anyways Bamp! b/c Digits, one of the snakes has passed: https://www.spin.com/2018/12/digits-...hug-snake-dead

Digits, Our Young Thug Office Snake, Is Dead

Some sad news out of Spin HQ: Digits, the little green snake sent to our office to promote a new Young Thug project earlier this year, has died. We’d say something nice here about the tragedy of her short life, but who knows—maybe she was already, like, 10 years old or something when Young Thug sent her to us. Either way, we’ll miss you, girl.

Digits slithered into our lives and our hearts in August, when Thug’s team at 300 Entertainment sent snakes to our colleagues at Billboard, and a number of other media outlets, as part of the rollout for his Slime Language collaborative mixtape. We had our ethical reservations about a promotional campaign involving a bunch of live animals, that require care to continue living, handed off to unsuspecting journalists with no advance warning. But we grew to love her, and now she’s gone.

Ross Scarano, Billboard’s VP of Content, was Digits’s closest companion here, unless you count the faux rock in her tank that she spent most of her time hiding underneath as a companion. Scarano tells Spin he last interacted with Digits on Friday evening, when he filled her tank with water.

“She’s been quite active in the last few weeks, and consistent with that, she dove right in to take a drink and I documented the moment on my IG story, with the martini emoji,” Scarano said. But by Monday, Digits was “gently coiled in the corner of the tank, underneath the warming lamp,” and not moving. When Scarano tried to stimulate her and she did not respond, he realized she had died.

Digits is not the first Young Thug snake to go. In September, we reported that Hubby, a snake first sent to Vice’s music publication Noisey and later adopted by the PR firm Girlie Action Media, had also died.

As for Digits, Scarano says, “I hope she passed peacefully.”

RIP Digits

[RickyNY]

I wouldn't want any kind of animal being sent to me without my foreknowledge and consent.

Mason, if you ever send me a black headed python or black tail Cribo without my foreknowledge and consent, be advice that I will not be upset with you.
I promise