These skills are on full display throughout The Appeal with Gucci’s soul-mates, producers Zaytoven and Drumma Boy, providing the musical blueprint. And listen a little longer and you’ll see that Gucci paints himself into a corner and then uses it to his advantage by continuing to find new and exciting ways to talk about familiar subjects while packing a mind-boggling amount of word play into seemingly straightforward lines. That joyful misanthropy is one of the most enjoyable parts of rap, just as it is for the Sex Pistols or ‘Brown Sugar’ or Charles Bukowski or Pulp Fiction. If Gucci seems simple at first listen, it’s because of his metronomic flow and uncompromising devotion to sex, drugs and diamonds as his subject matter. Not only does this style not lend itself to pop songs, it’s also the basis for a lot of the criticism directed at Gucci.
Gucci on the other hand, raps in a nearly impenetrable Georgia accent thickened by the dental work he had done after being viciously beaten in prison and, until recently, in a largely unchanging and dense flow consisting almost entirely of two syllable units. By the time Tha Carter III dropped, Wayne’s lyrics, even when nonsensical, were easy to decipher and he sang almost as often as he rapped. Wayne is certainly weirder than Gucci is, but he’s also infinitely more relatable to the casual listener. It’s amazing to think that any major record label could have pinned the same aspirations on Gucci. Wayne was vindicated by the overwhelming commercial success of Tha Carter III, even if it represented a creative low point. To them, Gucci is a nearly mentally challenged impostor who represents everything wrong with hip-hop today. Gucci is, simply put, the best rapper working today but as they did with Wayne before him, Gucci’s detractors, mostly hip-hop classicists, characterize him as a minstrel show character championed only by white hipsters and critics. Even if a few missteps keep The Appeal from living up to the best of Gucci’s mixtapes, it’s the best studio album he’s released. The obligatory curveballs thrown at him (“the club song,” “the for the ladies song”) are more successful in part because Gucci is actually on beats that make sense for his idiosyncratic flow and in part because Gucci is up to the challenge. This time around Gucci is mostly given the kind of big drum and haunted house synth bangers that he has owned on mixtapes for the past few years. Gucci’s follow up, The Appeal – Georgia’s Most Wanted, is a big improvement. Radric Davis, Gucci Mane’s 2009 studio album, the first since his meteoric mixtape rise, suffered from the cookie-cutter approach the major labels take to high profile rap releases and totally missed out on Gucci’s unique appeal. At the very least, we made it look sexy.The State vs. We did our best to do right by his catalog. Kendrick Lamar makes challenging projects. City is against the less replayable but deliciously complex To Pimp a Butterfly? Is it disrespectful to those two moments to call Damn better while we're still processing it? (Shit, some of us are still processing TPAB, shouts to Lucy.) How high is too high for Untitled Unmastered, an EP of leftovers that is, in many ways, just as nourishing as some full-lengths? These are challenging questions.
BEST AND WORST GUCCI MANE ALBUMS MOVIE
Who can say, truly, how much better the contemporary coming-of-age movie Good Kid, M.A.A.D. In fact, it's so strong it makes ranking his projects even harder than it would be for an equally great artist whose career has more obvious peaks and valleys.
There's no debating the fact that Kenny has quite the discography for a twentysomething. The proclamation hasn't been lost on him-he's boldly held himself up as the greatest multiple times this year, including on his latest studio album, Damn. Those same pundits and fans are already hailing that project as the front-runner for album of the year. To hear the rap community and gatekeepers tell it, Kendrick Lamar is sitting on two contemporary classics.
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