After a Twitter “meltdown” for the books, Gucci Mane violated probation and went to jail in 2013 persona non grata. In May, he emerged as if from a chrysalis, healthy, clean, and sober. He was greeted with acclaim that, while not as intense as his fever-hot peak in 2009, suggested a much broader cultural consensus about his music. One hopes it’s because the world finally caught up with the creative breadth of his work, but more likely it’s because they’ve recognized that work's consequences. Following his late-’00s mixtape supernova, Gucci Mane became a vector, both creative and collaborative, for a new generation of hip-hop stars: Migos, Chief Keef, and Young Thug, to name a few. In the three years he was away, this influence narrative became conventional wisdom, and a shortcut to argue his significance; those who doubted his creative capabilities couldn’t deny his impact.
The title of the first project since his release, Everybody Looking, could as easily describe this influence as it does his status as a trending topic. (It’s also a reference to his 2010 track of the same name, which would be the best song on this compilation by some miles were it included.) For several years, everybody—at least in the realm of underground street rap—really was looking to Gucci for where to go next. For the most part, Everybody Looking is a Gucci Mane mixtape in the most familiar sense. It will please fans looking for Another Gucci Mane mixtape. Everyone else will likely find it a bit spotty. Certain songs fall into familiar—now six- or seven-year-old—formulas. His vocals, no doubt out of practice, sound a bit rusty. But most of all, it just feels unfinished, rushed—halfway between a tribute to the improvisational tapes of his classic era and a fully-rendered album statement, it’s best considered a stopgap to tide over fans.
A few records on Everybody Looking stand apart, suggesting the seeds of a better, unrealized project. While Zaytoven’s “Out Do Ya” feels like a by-numbers 2009 pastiche, his turn on “Waybach” sounds fresh. The gritty Mike Will–produced “Pop Music” is a dark double-entendre that recalls the clever urgency of Gucci’s earlier work without falling into caricature. “Gucci Please” features hypnotic songwriting and a flow pattern that’s yet to suffer from overexposure. And bonus track “Multi Millionaire Laflare” is the moment his rapping sounds its most inspired: “Wrist so rocky got your bitch jockin’ ASAP/Every nigga tote a yopper, nigga, we a K-Camp.” None of these records push too far into new terrain, but they do make the case that there’s gas in the tank.
The space between those moments find Gucci sliding into a frozen approximation of earlier formulas. His lyrics can lean boilerplate. This is blatant on “Richest N**** in the Room,” where he peddles a familiar autobiographical tale he’s been spinning since the beginning. It’s a long-running songwriting archetype for him, but one with which we’re familiar at this point; without new details or a fresh approach, it’s more like hitting the requisite checkboxes than creating. The most unique and interesting aspects of Gucci’s life right now involve his three-year sentence, new healthy lifestyle, and flowering lovelife; they are occasionally alluded to throughout, but for the most part this project is unified by frequent references to his looming influence. While interesting to consider—in a wonkish sense—this is less than fascinating as the subject of music. It’s also become, just in the past year, less true; single “All My Children,” a reference to his aesthetic offspring, might have better been titled “All My Grandchildren,” as the new generation shows a closer debt to Guwop’s spiritual heir Chief Keef.
If albums are carefully selected, heavily A&Red projects designed to maximize an artist’s potential and impact, mixtapes have been a method for under-funded artists to perform a flanking maneuver. Notionally, a mixtape is different than an album in that it’s faster to put together, and perhaps a bit less consequential song-for-song, its best ideas spread out over multiple releases. Yet at his recorded peak in the late 2000s, Gucci gained such creative momentum he drowned out carefully-crafted releases by seemingly “bigger” artists.
Everybody Looking is a tribute to that era. But it’s not that era, and Gucci is no longer that artist. Though his music typically transcended the “disposable” mixtape medium in the late ’00s, those tapes were strategic efforts at pushing to a higher level. Once he got there, partially thanks to his label but perhaps also of his own design (he’d expressed the desire to work with Timbaland and the Neptunes in interviews), the A&R system threw him onto generic pop-rap records, underestimating his songwriting significance, seeing him—as many have before and since—as a wacky character simply in need of pricier framing.
This one-dimensional view of him as a charismatic character, rather than a craft-driven artist with his talons plunged deep into the fabric of American music, meant that recognition of his formal innovations was delayed. This artist was telling us where American music was going, and we tried to force him to follow us instead. Rather than working on records which emphasized and refined his own ideas, we ended up with “Spotlight” and “Gucci Time.” Who does everybody look to when their idol looks to others? An ideal future Gucci album, then, forgets about his “influence” as an end goal in itself. “Influence,” after all, is merely a side-effect of vision, originality and creativity. Moments here—as on recent guest verses for Dreezy and Kodak Black—suggest he’s still got it. Rather than chasing some past mixtape “golden era,” here’s hoping he faces the new challenge of making an album that celebrates him for being him.
