The Sunday Comic: Elton John f/ Young Thug "Rocket Man (Remix)"

There is a Young Thug and Elton John collaboration—somewhere.

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Complex Original

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There is a Young Thug and Elton John collaboration—somewhere. It exists in the ether of speculation right now, but sources say it may manifest as some kind of a "Rocket Man" rework. Nothing about this is far-fetched. Of course, Thug often alludes to his affinity for outer space. "I'm a rocket, rocket/I can't stop it, stop it," from the song "Power" almost foreshadows an Elton remix.

But without even digging much deeper, we begin to discover more archeological clues. For example, within the first stanza—the second line to be exact—of the original "Rocket Man," Elton belts "I'm gonna be high as a kite by then." On Young Thug's "Time of Ya Life," from his I Came From Nothing 3 mixtape, he raps "Get high as a kite"—again, placed in the second line of the opening stanza. Coincidence?

We should have seen this coming when Thug described his alien origins. "I'm not from here," he states in an interview with French media site Clique TV. "You heard of the new earth they found? It's a new earth, they just found it. It's 10 times bigger than earth, but it's just like earth. It looks identical, everything is the same. It looks just like earth though, so they call it earth. I'm probably from there," he concludes. Thug may have been referring to one of NASA's fairly recent discoveries, called Kepler-10c. The planet is said to be in a zone with respect to its distance to a star, that could potentially support life. It has a diameter twice the size of earth, and it is 17 times the mass, which means gravity on such a planet should have Thug feeling very light and buoyant on our earth. Perhaps Thug's first experience as a rocket man occurred when he traveled however many light-years it took to get to Atlanta, Georgia as a newborn.

We initially learned of Thug's resonance with Sir Elton in an interview with Elton a few months ago. He said he had heard a Thug song on Beats 1 radio, and went on to say that Thug reminded him of John Lennon, in that they both fearlessly presented themselves to the public in controversial and unorthodox ways. This, of course, is far from Elton's first foray into the rap world. In 2001, he famously performed "Stan" with Eminem. In 2006, he announced that wanted to make an album within the R&B/Hip Hop genres, listing Pharrell, Timbaland, and Kanye West as potential collaborators. Perhaps Thug is just the right person to finally make this kind of endeavor a reality for Elton.

With all of this in mind, it becomes difficult to revisit certain Elton John classics without imagining how smoothly Thug's voice would fit. Go listen to "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" right now and tell me Thug wouldn't snap during the crescendo that immediately follows Elton singing "This boy's too young to be singing the blues." But again, this is all immaterial if nothing ever gets released from the two rocket men. Hopefully, they have indeed co-piloted something intended to bless the inferior humans born on this standard issue, regular-sized earth.

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