Gucci Mane makes mixtapes. It's what he does. About a month and a half ago, Gucci was released from prison after serving a six-month parole-violation sentence. But it's no shock to see him coming out with an hour of new songs so soon after his release. After all, one of the best Gucci songs from last year was "First Day Out", which he supposedly recorded on, literally, his first day of freedom after he served his last six-month parole-violation sentence. Going to prison for parole violation, see, is the other thing Gucci does. Or, as the man himself puts it on "Georgia's Most Wanted", "I spend my winter in the jail, so I'm balling all summer/ Bad bitches on my tail hunt me like a bounty hunter." So if he goes back to the big house before 2010 ends, we can't say he didn't warn us.
Even with that prison sentence, Mr. Zone 6 isn't Gucci's first mixtape of the year. Back in spring, we got The Burrrprint (2) HD, which had some music that Gucci recorded over the phone from prison but more that was left over from earlier sessions. It's amazing he even had anything left; Gucci released six mixtapes and one official album last year. And even though he's just absurdly prolific, all of those releases made for a strong end-to-end listen. The Burrrprint (2), meanwhile, was just OK, which can only mean one thing: Despite the insane amount of music he puts out, Gucci cares about quality control. With The Burrrprint (2), we learned what happens when Gucci's reduced to releasing leftovers. And with Mr. Zone 6, we're reminded what happens when he has time to put together a serious album-length piece of work. The difference is revelatory.
If you're a Gucci neophyte looking for a way in, Mr. Zone 6 is every bit as strong a starting point as last year's best Gucci tape, The Burrprint: The Movie 3-D. It's got all the hallmarks we've come to expect from a Gucci tape: cheaply catchy twinkling-synth beats, intricately goofy wordplay, singsong choruses that get stuck in your head so hard they start to drive you nuts. If Gucci's most recent prison sentence has made him at all reflective, we don't hear it here. Instead, he stays firmly in his wheelhouse throughout. But there is a slight adjustment in approach here: Gucci seems to realize that he's a divisive figure, that plenty of rap fans still think he's a flamboyant buffoon who can't rap.
For those listeners, Gucci puts on something of a rapping clinic: switching up his flow every few bars, jamming as many syllables as possible into quick-rewind clumps. Only a few guest-rappers appear on Mr. Zone 6, and the guys invited are straight-ahead hardhead types like Waka Flocka Flame and Yo Gotti. Compared to them, perfectly effective in their quick appearances, Gucci seems to be on another level completely-- rapping lazy figure-eights around whoever steps on a track with him. For the first time, Gucci seems to want us to notice that he's a great rapper.
But this is still a Gucci tape, so nobody should approach it expecting Illmatic levels of insight. Instead, we get punchlines stupid in their brilliance, or brilliant in their stupidity: "Just like Levert, I like to flirt/ I'm not your Casanova/ I'm not Romeo/ It's Gucci, ho/ I'm tryna bend you over." Or: "Take a TwitPic of Gucci dick and send it as a Tweet/ Ever since she met me, say them niggas obsolete." (Seriously, the way he pronounces the word "Tweet" gets me every time.) Gucci's funniest ad-lib is a barfing sound, and he uses it wherever possible. This is, uh, impolite music, and there's not a person alive making better impolite music than Gucci Mane. So for all the work he does maintaining a single rhyme over the course of an entire verse, or finding newer and slipperier ways of introducing a double-time flow, the moments that get stuck in your head are the simple isolated boasts: "Guns like Super Contra," "cocaine whiter than Taylor Swift," "I stereotype my fuckin' self." And yeah, there's a certain level of insight in that last phrase. But if you take it too seriously, Gucci Mane will laugh at you. He's laughing anyway.
