CAUTION: Gucci rock yellow

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"Milhouse would've been cooler" - @nickgorski

Gucci Mane - Lemonade

Gucci Mane – Wasted (feat. Plies)

Big Boi – Shine Blockas (feat. Gucci Mane)

Gucci Mane has been to jail three times, and wears Bart Simpson around his neck. That’s probably the best way to describe the paradoxical Atlanta rapper, and the best way to describe “Lemonade,” with its jagged off-time piano, clanking like “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” on steroids, with digitalized 808 clicks in place of The RZA’s real-ass drums. Meanwhile, stone-faced, gravel-voiced Gucci tosses out sardonic rhymes about buying yellow shit and then yells “BURR” or slurs “le-mooon,” with UGK’s rigid sixteenth-note flow, DOOM’s blunt-wrecked voice (…or maybe Jeezy), and sleight rhymes that rhyme haphazardly, when they feel like it. Also, the chorus hook is performed by children, which radiates this weird Jackson 5-meets-Willy Wonka vibe, except that they’re singing more lines about YELLOW SHIT – “Lemons on the chain, with the V-cuts; lemonade in shade, with my feet up; lemons on ya face, watch ‘em freeze up.”

This song is AWESOME…for the record…a perfect, tangled traffic-jam intersection of weird-ass ways to approach hip-hop – but it’s also the embodiment of why Gucci’s exaggerated, nearly parodic, and totally inimitable version of crack-rap is one of the most accessible, interesting, and fun-as-fuck things going on at the moment, Top 40 or otherwise. Take the lyrics, which perfectly exemplify Gucci’s idiot-savant mystique, his free use of crack-rapper mythology but independence from it: is he singing “yellow polo, polo slippers” or “yellow polo, pole of strippers”? “Livin’ out of shame with my feet up” or “lemonade in shade, with my feet up”? “Lemon pepper wings” or “lemon purple Wayne”? Is Gucci willfully ignoring the difference between banal, materialistic innocence and the explicitly ADULT SITUATIONS in trap music, or cleverly obscuring it? Am I supposed to buy coke from this guy with the Bart Simpson ice??

This piece started out as a deconstruction of “Lemonade,” which is a song that I’ve played like forty times in the past two days – but Gucci Mane’s lyrical prowess, and subsequent success, indicates a lot of stuff involving image versus identity, truth versus major-label marketing departments. What I’m getting at is that so many rappers are dependent on the crack-rapper archetype to solidify and legitimize their own personal narratives, which are, in actuality, questionably valid – for instance, the outing of Rick Ross, whose image as “Rick Ross” hinges on his cocaine legitimacy, as a CORRECTIONS OFFICER in his days as William Leonard Roberts. That’s not to say that all of trap music is lying to you. But during times in which Realness is a loaded, propagandist buzzword, mitigated and perverted by the media, by record execs, and by the rappers themselves – all of whom know that there’s more money to be made in sensationalism than truth – it’s refreshing that Gucci Mane’s releasing songs that don’t really seem to give a fuck about authenticity. Rather, the concept is treated casually, flippantly, residing alongside punchlines about yellow shit, getting wasted, karaoke-ing Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” and the neck problems bred by having chains that are “HEAVY, REAL HEAVY, IT FEELS HEAVY! SOMEBODY HELP ME! MY NECK HURT…MY CHAIN HEAVY!” In Gucci’s best raps, he’s not intent on being real, but on being openly ridiculous (this, after all, is a dude that released three mixtapes in a single day) – perhaps implying that, given the new year and the burgeoning relevance of Drake in place of Jeezy (or The Game or 50 Cent or _____) , there’s not much money left to be had in crack-rap.

That being said: given the history of rappers involved in the drug trade, perhaps forecasting crack-rap’s imminent combustion is premature, wishful thinking. A better prediction: as with Seattle’s early-90s grunge bubble, the industry will saturate (soon) with wannabes and soundalikes, the general populace will lose interest, profitability will decline, and the spotlight will shift to a different region, a different style of music, and a different idiosyncratic subsection of America (…here’s hoping Milwaukee gets a shot) – because, as we all know, the business models of a) the music industry and b) a swarm of locusts are surprisingly similar. In the meantime, we have Gucci: clearly a cog in the industrial machine*, but nobly attempting to exist apart from it (the best example of this being his three-in-a-day mixtape stunt – as a rapper, there’s probably not a better way to differentiate yourself from your major-label record deal than a mixtape***). This juxtaposition is crucial to Gucci’s own ridiculous, two-sided image: the side in which he wears cartoon-character ice and gets wasted with the white boys, and the side in which he violates probation, tests positive for coke, maybe helped kill some guy (allegedly in self-defense) and goes to jail fucking frequently. But his best raps are a slurred, bipartisan coalescence of the two sides, which breeds genuinely interesting verses from a genuinely interesting dude – Gucci Mane is infinitely marketable, but that’s only a byproduct of being genuinely interesting. He’s also good at rapping. Which, now that I think about it, sounds like a description of just about any relevant emcee.

* evidence: listen to “Spotlight,” with its token Usher** guest spot and a beat that hijacks Nelly Furtado’s ”Say It Right.” Or you could also listen to “I Think I’m in Love” or “Bad Bad Bad.” The moral of the story? Not even Gucci Mane is above formulaic bullshit, at least sometimes.

** there’s an episode of The Boondocks with Usher, in which the moral of the story is: if your wife is sleeping with Usher, you’re a pussy.

*** We often tend to think of mixtapes reverently, as existing entirely for us, as free gifts, as if they were delivered to our doorstep without us even asking. I think we’re ignoring the other side of the coin: they represent a lyrical blank slate for the rapper, in which major-label album conventions (the girl/boy song, the banger, the meditative glimpse into the inner self, the Usher song, the other banger, the one with Li’l Wayne) – which are traditionally UN-BREAKABLE unless you’ve got enough clout that you can afford to break the rules – can be subverted or ignored entirely in favor of a rawer, arguably Realer portrayal of the artist. They’re opportunities for the artist to create and define himself in directions expressly forbidden by major label convention and copyright ordinance.

Or are they? Isn’t everything that these rappers do mitigated by their handlers? Do we actually know shit about Li’l Wayne – or do we only know what we’re allowed to know? I’d really like to wrap up this shit up, so I’m going to end it like this: Andrew W.K. recently admitted that “Andrew W.K.” is, by-and-large, a complicated, apparently-justifiable calculated pseudo-conspiracy designed to appeal to a hard-partying target demographic. Yet he also insists that the music exists in a vacuum, as something that he endorses honestly and loves truly – as something that can’t really be devalued by the debatable ethics behind its creation. Can it? Think about that situation as a metaphor for pop music in general – or, think about it as a situation that indicates the unbecoming truth behind any major label artist. As Mark E. Smith once sang: “Who are the riff-makers – who are they really? How old are the stars, really?”