Gucci Mane is having a rough 2011. He started the year facing trial for parole violation-- the same charge that's kept him in prison for a pretty good chunk of the past two years. After his lawyer filed a plea of mental incompetency, he had to spend some time in a psychiatric institution. When he got out, he pretty much confirmed his own insanity by getting a giant tattoo on his face: an ice cream cone with lightning bolts shooting out of it. The Appeal: Georgia's Most Wanted, the commercial album he released late last year, shot for crossover status and failed to get there. This year's Gucci 2 Time mixtape was a muddled mess. And Waka Flocka Flame, Gucci's protégé and an infinitely shittier rapper, has been outshining his onetime mentor for at least the past six months-- scoring huge radio hits, changing the face of rap, and completely dominating Brick Squad Mafia, the new mixtape from Gucci's 1017 Brick Squad crew. Gucci, who was rap's most exciting figure a year and a half ago, is on a profound losing streak, and it's easy to hear The Return of Mr. Zone 6, his new street album, as an attempt to reverse that slide.
It's also Gucci's attempt to update his style in a changing rap landscape. When Gucci was peaking, he was working regularly with producers like Zaytoven and DJ Speedy, whose twinkly, playful beats made an ideal backdrop for his slurry, melodic choruses and joyous bursts of wordplay. But thanks to Waka Flocka's rise, the dark, synthetic heaviness of crunk is now back in vogue, and Gucci's adjusted his sound to match. Gucci's main collaborator on The Return of Mr. Zone 6 is Drumma Boy, the Memphis producer who's worked extensively with Gucci's onetime foe Young Jeezy and who also helmed Waka's anthem "No Hands". Drumma favors gothy string-churns and overdriven snares, and his beats have a grim majesty. But they aren't really suited to a rapper as gleefully drunk on language as Gucci. And so Gucci tends to slow his delivery here, putting more threat in his voice and easing up on the dizzy fun.
But this is still Gucci Mane, and he still comes up with some seriously sticky hooks and great turns of phrase: "I'm a dinosaur, you a herbivore/ I use words and verbs you ain't heard before," "Get ya head bust wide for ya old-man pride." (His explanation for the ice-cream face tat is a bit unsatisfying, though: "Ice cream on my face and chain cuz that's the life that I live, shawty.") Even though it's not really where he lives, Gucci can do this kind of crawling menace as well as almost anyone. With his delivery slowed down, he's still got one of the greatest voices of any rapper working: a marble-mouthed mutter that sticks to beats like peanut butter. And there are plenty of other nice moments on The Return: Master P coming back from faded-mogul oblivion to grunt like it's 1997 again, Birdman turning in one of his hardest verses ever, Wale continuing on in his evolution toward brutally emphatic strip-club rapper.
But there are also a few completely awful ideas. Gucci doesn't need to devote an entire track to relationships and feelings, the way he does on "Better Baby"; he's at his best when he's making fun of that stuff. And he damn sure doesn't need to spend a whole song singing through Auto-Tune, which he does on "My Year"; rappers try to sing all the time, but never quite this tunelessly. These groaners mean that Gucci's still nowhere near recapturing the momentum he had a couple of years ago. And while a few moments of that old brilliant lunacy would've gone a long way toward saving the day, he instead focuses on cranking out one solid banger after the next. The resulting album is perfectly effective, but it's almost never inspired.
