"My jewelry game is at an all-time high right now," says Gucci Mane, over the phone from prison, on the intro to The Burrrprint (2). I'm sorry, but that's frankly hard to believe: The only jewelry he's wearing on the mixtape cover is a pair of handcuffs. Still, if that cover is to be believed, he has no trouble getting access to lobster, cell phones, and pink bottles of champagne while in prison. At no point do we learn how he opens bottles of pink champagne while he's got handcuffs on. It can't be easy.
The Burrrprint (2) is the latest example of a long tradition: A rap album that comes out while the guy who made it is in jail. (And in this case, it really is an album rather than a mixtape, at least in the sense that his label is trying to rack up at least a couple of bucks by selling the damn thing in actual stores.) And while the bulk of the mixtape consists of tracks that Gucci recorded before starting his year-long parole-violation prison sentence, we still hear a whole lot of phoned-in missives from the imprisoned Gucci. He even recorded one song, "Intro (Live From Fulton County Jail)", from an actual prison phone. It's still very much a Gucci Mane song, not concerned with anything much deeper than his yellow Lamborghini with the butter rims. Even locked up, Gucci refuses to turn introspective. No matter what, he's determined to give us more cheap synthetic beats, more loopy word choices, more big choruses, more dizzy celebrations of materialistic pleasures. In other words, he's doing exactly the same shit he did before he went to prison. He's not even working out! "No push-ups, but I'm still looking good as a motherfucker," he tells us.
As a straight-up Gucci mixtape, The Burrrprint (2) comes nowhere near the panache of its predecessor. The original Burrrprint, itself a sequel of Gucci's The Movie mixtape, was pretty much straight murder from end to end. On this one, though, filler abounds. Gucci's memorable punchlines come less often, and his choruses don't stick quite so easily. Gucci's cadences are less inventive, wheezier, more tired. Gucci's guest rappers are bigger stars than usual-- Ludacris, Rick Ross, Trey Songz-- but they add less than longtime collaborators like energetic mushmouth Wacka Flocka, who gets a couple of good moments. Considering the insane volume of material Gucci recorded before going to prison, it's pretty amazing that he wasn't on autopilot earlier, but it's still disappointing to hear him at something less than full speed.
But even when not at his best, Gucci continues to fascinate, partly because his voice has rap's best flattened-out party-dude bounce, and partly because you never know what kind of absurd word combinations he'll come up with next. (Some of my favorites from this one: "Your girlfriend says my earrings are erotic," "to a hood chick, Gucci's voice is euphoric," "I got so much jewelry on that I think I need a clone.") "Shining for No Apparent Reason" has maybe the best Gucci song title ever. And some complete tracks are worthy entries in the Gucci canon, like the rumbling Ludacris collab "Atlanta Zoo" or the spare synth-whistle showcase "Boy From the Block". Best of all is the nine-minute posse cut "Coca Coca", on which Gucci rounds up six of his frequent collaborators (OJ Da Juiceman, Yo Gotti, Nicki Minaj, etc.) and takes every last one of them to school.
But the real takeaway from The Burrrprint (2) is that Gucci is going to continue to make these ecstatically ignorant bangers just as soon as he's able. "Worst Enemy", the closing track from Gucci's The State Vs. Radric Davis album, hinted at a more thoughtful and introspective Gucci, and that Gucci never returns here. Instead, any moments of reflection come almost by accident, as when he interrupts the brag-fest "Do This Shit Again": "I got acquitted for murder, it was purely self-defense/ I hope they don't try to do that to me no more, don't wanna do that again/ Walking out my jail cell, don't wanna go through that shit again/ Thirty K at King of Diamonds, watch me throw that in the wind." And still the image of bills floating through the air is what lingers. When Gucci gets back out of prison and returns to crafting images like that, it'll be a good day.
