The cover for Yo Gotti’s 2013 album, I Am, references the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike that brought Martin Luther King, Jr. to the city. King was assassinated in Memphis during the strike, and both events had an impact on the city’s soul and (later) rap scenes. Many local artists, including Gotti, have maintained that there’s a throughline bonding the incidents in 1968, the sounds of Stax Records, and the dread in Memphis rap. “Soul is like—kinda like pain. You hear that even in the voice tone or the selection of music, and it just feel dark and painful, like the struggle,” he told NPR. And local legend Playa Fly once said, “There’s always been a dark cloud over the city. They killed the symbol for peace here.”
Gotti has emerged in recent years as the Memphis mouthpiece, a blue-collar MC channeling that same darkness. “I am the struggle/I am the hustle/I am the city,” he rapped on I Am’s title track. The album’s unofficial sequel, I Still Am, Gotti’s ninth, finds him digging deeper into roles as struggler, hustler, and city spokesman. This time the self-proclaimed reality rapper takes his Memphis pride global—from hometown shoutouts inside the Ridgecrest Apartments to jet-setting across Europe and Asia. As he expands his horizons, the enduring cracks in his writing resurface.
For years in Memphis rap, the buck stopped with Three 6 Mafia and Eightball & MJG, each act a tangent of the Memphis rap club culture. Gotti, who sounds unquestionably local in his language but panders more broadly to the sounds of the moment stylistically, has become the latest (and unlikeliest) flagship star in Memphis since the late Aughts. He buoys his more trap-angling deep cuts with surprise hits like “Down in the DM,” and his willingness to play ball has earned him national exposure and gold and platinum plaques. But still, there is very little separating him from his peers. He puts his scene on by emulating outsiders: He works mostly with Atlanta beatmakers like Mike WiLL Made-It, Southside, Zaytoven, and Drumma Boy, all of whom appear on I Still Am. The album also reunites Gotti with Miami producer and “Down in the DM” architect Ben Billion$. Inside their productions, he tackles all of the trap tropes. Yo Gotti is basically a Gucci Mane understudy, and his albums play out as if he’s been forced to replace the star last minute.
Gotti is a competent rapper who allows his voice to do much of the work, pressing into beats with repetitive phrases and rhyme schemes, single syllable rapping, and tottering slow flows. His raps get right to the point—usually at the expense of scene-setting with very little exposition. He’s either talking passed unidentified subjects, or thinking out loud about dealing, flexing, or defending his territory, or in the act of doing those things. He doesn’t have a particularly compelling point of view; some songs move in circles. There is a sense of tension in his raps, but there is rarely the activity necessary to make them gripping.
“Struggle” is a word that best describes most Gotti songs (sometimes as much in execution as in subject matter), but I Still Am has a more pointed focus on betrayal. The primary perpetrator is Gotti’s ex, but at different points on the album, he feels betrayed by close confidants, colleagues, snitches, and to a certain extent, God. On occasion, a faceless “they” are out to ruin all he’s worked for: “They had their hand out but I ain’t submissive/You tryin’ to extort a nigga, I’m from Memphis.” These betrayals open the door for deeply personal “reality raps” about small-time coke trafficking, life on the other side of dealing dope, and trying to balance hometown responsibility with world-conquering aspirations. Even as a rich man, Gotti’s struggle continues.
On “One on One,” after setting the premise—“If I could talk to God like a real nigga one on one, I’d tell him”—he poses several hypothetical questions about doing the right thing, his misdeeds, and the friends he lost to prison and the cemetery. There’s apprehension in his voice as he weighs safety measures. He’s sneaking his gun into church and worrying about his security. Most of the violence on I Still Am is a reply, in defense of comrades or his position atop the Memphis rap world. “Old lady in the neighborhood said I’m the devil, she a damn liar,” he raps. “See me bustin’ that fire, tryna protect the guys from the other side.”
The more poignant moments on I Still Am, like the stamping “2908” and “Don’t Wanna Go Back,” which laments time spent as a shooter and corner boy, are sometimes offset by the more unapologetic songs like “Brown Bag” and the chest-beating “Juice.” He can’t seem to decide which stance to take: proud street pharmacist or mournful, reformed peddler of toxins. But this conflict does produce songs like the understated and hypnotizing “Yellow Tape,” which finds Gotti at full tilt, leveraging his sandy caw for emphasis: “I’m bumpin’ slaughter gang, 21, back when I was 21/Drive-bys, homicides, switching sides, you were done/How we in the shootout four deep and I’m the only one/With an empty drum, where I’m from that’ll get you hung.” No matter how famous Gotti gets, you can’t take the hood out of him. On “Around the World,” backed by singing children, he travels to Dubai, the UK, and Japan, but always ends up back in the ‘Crest. It’s too bad that I Still Am has more to say about the city he represents than who he actually is.
