The Quarantine Beginner’s Guide To Gucci Mane, One Of The Greatest Rappers Of All Time

September 23, 2020, Winston Cook Wilson

Gucci has, like, a million songs. Here's our guide to the best possible experience with his music.

Rap pundits have been anointing new heavy-hitters in the world of Atlanta hip-hop for going on 20 years now. In the 2010s, we’ve heralded Future, Young Thug, Migos, and Lils Yachty, Uzi Vert, and Baby as musical game changers in their city. Someone these hitmakers and oversized personalities have lasted longer than others. (Trindad James will always live on in my heart, though, and in Uncut Gems.) But if you hearken back a decade before the biggest trap hits of the streaming era—from “Bad and Boujee” to “Black Beatles” to “Sicko Mode”—you’ll find the likes of T.I., Young Jeezy, and Shawty Lo busy setting their stylistic template.

No one, however, was more crucial to defining trap music as we know it today than Gucci Mane. At the time he broke out in the mid-2000s, no rapper sounded quite like Radric Davis, a former drug dealer and erstwhile music manager who released his debut single as Gucci Mane (aka La Flare) in 2005. No one was as funny and full of one-liners about stacking bricks and the daily operations of the trap house; no one sneered “yeeeahhh” so alluringly; no one seemed quite as determined. Emerging from the era of ringtone-rap one-hit-wonders, Gucci quickly figured out how to stand the test of time as a rapper without relying on support from the industry or critics: flood the market with product.

With mixtapes that were as culturally significant—and usually better—than his studio albums, Gucci Mane made himself impossible to ignore. He quickly established himself as a self-made mogul who was maximizing profits by releasing digital releases outside of his major-label contracts. In what might be termed his Golden Era (2007-2009), he released 5 albums and 21 official mixtapes. To date—despite spending two years in jail from May 2014 to 2016—he’s amassed a catalogue of 71 mixtapes, not including his 14 studio albums, as well as a slew of several collaborative albums and EPs.

To a Guwop neophyte, the task of separating the wheat from the chaff in this vast sea of 20-plus-track tapes might seem too daunting. Scrolling through his Spotify artist page is dizzying, with official mixtapes up against questionably attributed compilations and dates incorrectly. Since we are sheltering in place, we all indubitably have more sifting time on our hands. Still, a rough guide is a great way of saving you a lot of time on less essential entries—say, 2014’s WW3 and Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner trilogies, which will be remembered most fondly by the people who were there at the time.

Why Gucci Mane now, in the winter—or rather, summer and fall—of our discontent? His best music is some of the most charming, clever, and fun released in the 21st century. Despite his snowballing canonization on the part of mainstream critics, his greatest mixtape-famous tracks will always be underrated unless their best moments get passed on through younger generations. Enjoy the yelpy, funhouse trap music of Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti? You can trace its DNA back past Young Thug to his mentor Gucci. Guwop might have been gruffer and more imposing, but he was never afraid of getting wacky stylistically. This guide will lay out everything you need to make a workout or living-room party playlist of great Gucci Mane songs. This music is guaranteed to reveal Rap Caviar to be what it really is: a watered-down summary of weak imitations of what Gucci was already doing 15 years ago.

Early days (2005-2006)

The Gucci Mane and Jeezy collaboration “So Icy” was released in 2005, and became the biggest song in their home city. It took two strong but inconsistent albums for Gucci to hit his stride and find his process, though. Chicken Talk is the greatest effort from his formative period—a bridge between Hard to Kill, a studio album which showed the constraints of Gucci working from w