Even back in 2009, when Gucci Mane seemed momentarily poised to conquer the known rap universe, there was something combustible about him. His career trajectory felt grease-slicked and frightening, like he was in a car fish-tailing across a major highway, and Gucci did his best, in his music, to reinforce this sensation: Two of his most-repeated ad-libs ("nyyyyyaooooowwww", "SKRRT! SKRRT!") are the sounds of high-speed vehicles spinning out of control. Everything that has happened to him since then-- arrests, jail time, abuse cases-- illustrates the sad difference between the artist who courts chaos and the artist who succumbs to it. Everyone loves a live wire when they're sparking, but the flip side of "live wire" is, of course, "perpetual fuck-up." Gucci fans and rubberneckers alike have had more than enough of both sides to last them a few years.
To have fallen in love with Gucci's drunken-carnival rendering of gangsta rap, then, is to have learned to take what you can get from him, when and where you can get it. I may be alone on the internet in admitting it, but I enjoyed BAYTL, his inexplicable, internet-baiting team-up with Kreayshawn associate and deeply lamentable human being V-Nasty, simply because it provided several solid-to-great Gucci verses alongside production by frequent collaborator Zaytoven, whose best beats sound like they're built entirely from Dippin' Dots. Gucci never conquered the rap world-- sales figures for The State vs. Radric Davis, his best shot, roughly equalled that of the Game's last studio album. But nothing has been able to quite stop him and, every once in a while, he still surprises us with something great.
Trap Back, his latest release with noted mixtape curator and professional loud person DJ Holiday, is just that: great. It isn't as great as The Movie 3-D or the first Writing on the Wall mixtape. Or Gucci Sosa or even the 10-track Gucciamerica throwaway or The Gooch Man or any number of his past classics. But like all his best music, it is colorful and interesting and flagrantly dumb and sneakily clever, all at once. His mush-mouth buries the details of his writing so deep that you'd have to spend ages picking them out, but on a good Gucci verse, you can feel them flying by on first pass, content in the knowledge that you will be able to revisit and explore them later. In the dope-sales reminiscence of "Back in 95", details like "Smokers didn't know my name, so they used to call me Black" and "Dope-fiend Willie used to finger-fuck my rims" leap out and instantly signify a great rapper firing on all cylinders.
Gucci's best verses are also insanely memorable; it's very hard to walk away from his music without at least two or three phrases doing the dryer-cycle tumble through your mind. His voice is a difficult instrument to describe: Pitched somewhere between whine and blare, he sometimes sounds like a huge, overgrown baby who's bumped his head on a table corner. But the way he uses it to take apart words and put them back together with strange new emphases-- "Ghett-O, a-LASK-a, ghett-O, neBRASKa"; "I'm in the trap house, with SHOES on"-- is a brain-teasing pleasure. The phrasing in his best raps feels sticky, like a filthy movie theater floor under sneakers: "I drop the top like 'fuck it'/ I'm not in no lil' Cutlass/ I pull up in the 'What the?'/ Fuck, I don't know was it" he teases on "Plain Jane". On "Thank You", he unleashes this thick, transcription-worthy run: "Count a hundred in Syria/ Peanut-butter interior/ My jewelry game on Frigidaire, my watch game cold as Siberia/ Gucci Mane, is you serious? Hell yeah, I'm serious/ Red watch with a red chain, my diamonds on they period."
The other reason Trap Back is great is the increasingly prominent Atlanta producer Mike Will Made It, who continues to demonstrate that he has an ear for the smallest details that make a simple rap song a great rap song. His sound is like a Flubberized blending of Zaytoven's 8-bit pings and Drumma Boy's funeral marches: it's menacing and playful all at once, which means its a perfect match for Gucci's style. In a development that really shouldn't have taken this long, he flips the Tetris theme into trap music for Gucci to rap on for "Get It Back". The instrumental could serve as a neatly boiled-down synopsis of Gucci's style: simple, deceptively absorbing, maddeningly addictive, frantically paced. Drumma Boy also swings by, and Zaytoven contributes some of his gangsta tinker-toy productions. The result isn't a revelation exactly, but it's the most recognizably Gucci-ish Gucci release in some time.
