In March 2009, Atlanta rapper Gucci Mane came home from prison after serving six months for violating parole. Then, in November, Gucci violated again and went right back to prison for another year-long bid. That means Gucci only had about eight months of freedom in 2009. In that time he still managed to release, by my count, six mixtapes (including the three-in-one-day Cold War series) and one official album. He also found time to crank out an absurd number of guest-verses, videos, and live shows, buried a long-raging feud with Young Jeezy, and made minor stars out of proteges OJ Da Juiceman and Waka Flocka Flame. Along the way, he became rap's most divisive figure, with the internet peanut gallery lining up to call him everything from a borderline-retarded grunter to rap's last, best hope. If you followed rap in 2009, you had to have some opinion on Gucci. He had quite a year.
For the uninitiated, Gucci is a tough sell. The sheer volume of his output means there's no go-to entry point. He delivers all his lyrics in a marbled monotone so thick that his lyrics can be hard to make out on first listen. He never highlights his punchlines (or anything else, really); they just float by. He favors one simple, monotonic type of beat: a tense, sproingy, synth-based thing that always just sounds cheap. He raps way, way more about his cars and jewelry than anything else.
Over time, though, those liabilities become strengths. Because he mushmouths his punchlines so hard, you have to listen harder and more often to hear them. And it certainly helps that his punchlines are often dizzily funny and inventively intricate: "Popping Cris, think that I need Alcohol Anonymous/ 45 in the club, I could kill a hippopotamus." His deadpan is great for "wait, did he really say that?" reactions. And even if his actual delivery rarely varies, he has some bottomless number of actual flows; he attacks the beat differently on every verse, putting inflections and pauses in unexpected places and still always finding the beat's pocket. His unrelenting focus on materialistic **** rarely rankles because he's better at rapping about that stuff than just about anyone else. Both his monochromatic beats and his staggering productivity give his work a sense of immersion, hitting the same note again and again with immensely satisfying results-- like a daylong sick-day binge on James Bond movies.
And with Gucci, there's also a sense of shared experience. People are listening to this guy; he's not just another voice in the internet echo chamber. He's ascended to a very particular type of cult stardom in an age when rap stars aren't supposed to exist anymore. He's found his audience by elevating ignorance to expertly absurdist art, thus making his 2009 a worthy successor to Cam'ron's 2004 or Lil Wayne's 2005. He's been on a very, very serious roll.
The October DJ Drama collaboration Movie 3D: The Burrprint remains the greatest of Gucci's 2009 mixtapes, in part because it's the purest example of his aesthetic. This is wheelhouse Gucci: Drug- and money-talk over simple, eerie Casio beats with no crossover attempts and almost no guest spots from rappers outside Gucci's close-knit camp. Gucci's boasts and put-downs are playful but matter-of fact throughout: "You are not the owner of that car that is a loaner/ I got money stacks that's tall as you cause that's just my persona." Even when he's describing crack houses in detail, he keeps telling jokes and making up goofy metaphors. There's one song about turning down ugly groupies and another about how he has to hang out with his shadow because he's so far beyond everyone else. The members of his inconsistent 1017 Brick Squad crew all nail their verses on the trio of posse cuts.
But the mixtape's greatest asset might be its sneakily melodic sensibility. Gucci's delivery has a casual singsong elegance that you never quite see coming, and the result means virtually every chorus is memorable-- something unthinkable from almost any other rapper. And since Gucci almost never raps over other people's beats, that means you're getting an hour's worth of full-on songs, something that not even Cam and Wayne offered during their peak-era runs.
You'd think that instinctive ear for hooks would convince Warner, Gucci's label, to let him do his thing unencumbered on the official album, The State Vs. Radric Davis. But lead single "Spotlight", a tone-deaf Usher collab that keeps exactly nothing of what makes Gucci likable; it had people doomsaying before the album ever came out. Mostly, though, the LP does a good job keeping Gucci's culty selling points intact on a larger stage. Regular collaborators Zaytoven and Fatboi turn in several beats each, and many of the other tracks, from name producers like Jazze Pha and Scott Storch, sound a lot like Zaytoven beats. Big-name guests like Wayne and Cam bring their A-games because they know they're dealing with a rapper on their level.
Most importantly, Gucci maintains his singular weirdness throughout. He keeps finding unexpected ways to say the same stuff: "I be runnin' gunnin' stunnin' with a hundred killers riiiiiidin'/ And you snitchin' bitchin' tattle tellin' and scared to stand besiiiiiide me." He says some stuff that barely makes sense: "Eat rappers like Jeffrey Dahmer/ Dope color Sinead O'Connor." He has one song about wearing all-yellow everything and another where guest crooner Bobby Valentino offers to **** you in front of your father. He sings the chorus of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" mid-verse. There are a few missteps, like the run of mid-album R&B tracks that saps some momentum. But the LP has a energy rare to major-label rap efforts. Like Wayne's Tha Carter II, it translates Gucci's mixtape triumphs into something more digestible and immediate.
Of course, the album came out when Gucci was back in prison and sold way fewer copies than expected. Gucci's detractors took the opportunity to declare his regional stardom a grand illusion. Those detractors should take a good, hard listen to the late-album track "Worst Enemy"-- a rare introspective moment where Gucci extends something resembling an olive branch to Jeezy and frankly discusses his own self-destructive tendencies, all without compromising his dense, frantically hopscotching sense of wordplay. So: When he feels like it, Gucci can talk about serious matter with the same infectious verve that he uses to call your jeweler a loser. Artistically, at least, he's just getting started. And now that he's going to be locked up for a while, the world has a chance to catch up.
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