It's a Wednesday afternoon in mid-July, and Gucci Mane—rapper, legend, beater of long odds—is right where he's supposed to be, in a recording studio in an unglitzy pocket of North Miami. The Hit Factory Criteria Miami—as the former Criteria Studios has been awkwardly known since the owners of New York's Hit Factory studio bought it in 1999—is where "Layla" and "I Feel Good" were recorded. Everyone from the Eagles and Black Sabbath to Justin Bieber and Rihanna has worked on music here. If these walls could talk, chances are they'd be under a strict NDA.
Gucci's sitting in a swivel chair in the control room of Studio A in athletic shorts, a Nike T-shirt with a launching rocket on the front, and vintage-style Dominique Wilkins flip-flops. When he smiles, which is often, he flashes a wall of blinding white veneers instead of the gold grill he used to favor. The infamous triple-scoop ice-cream-cone tattoo on the right side of his face—which he got in 2011, immediately after being discharged from a psychiatric hospital—is faded, like an old scar, only a few shades darker than the skin around it.
He's working on a record called The Evil Genius, which is an unusual Gucci album in that it will be the first full-length collection of new music he's released this year. The notion of a sober Gucci took some getting used to; it's somehow harder to wrap your brain around the fact that one of the most dauntingly prolific rappers ever to drop 46 new songs on a random August Tuesday is now a proponent of judicious self-editing.
"I hate to say it, but I don't think [there's] the same market for that—if I put out 15 mixtapes, they cannot really do what I need them to do," Gucci says. "When I do put my songs out, I gotta put out a serious project that everybody gonna like. If I got 16 to 17 punches, I want those punches to count."
Which is not to say he's been absent from the pop landscape in 2018. His voice still rings out everywhere, from his guest verse on Rich the Kid's hit "Plug Walk" remix to the dirtbag-leftist podcast Chapo Trap House, whose opening theme is a screwed-down remix of Gucci's 2012 "El Chapo" by Ontario's DJ Smokey. Radio omnipresences Migos, Young Thug, Nicki Minaj, and Metro Boomin all benefited from early Gucci co-signs. But his biggest impact may be intangible, aesthetic, spiritual. He is present as a vibe. He's probably at least part of the reason your favorite SoundCloud rapper has an ill-advised face tattoo, and Post Malone's whole deal is essentially a teleportation accident involving Gucci's white-boy-slang-flipping "Wasted" and the pensive side of Justin Bieber.
Gucci may still be indelibly associated with Atlanta, but he's been a part-time resident of Miami since 2010. He goes back to Atlanta whenever he can, to tap into its unique energy—"I love Atlanta," he says, "and it definitely still influences my sound"—but he finds it easier to think and create in Miami, far from old friends, the scene that birthed him, and the traces of his former life. "I get a good vibe down here," he says. "I like recording down here. I like looking at the water. I just like the peace. Peace of mind."
Peace and tranquility may not be the first association you have with the city of Scarface, Art Basel, and Uncle Luke, but today the Hit Factory does feel tranquil, its halls as cool and quiet as a spa.
Gucci is rolling with zero entourage today, except for an Atlantic Records publicist who has been flown in from New York specifically to ensure that our one-hour interview happens as scheduled, and who will fly back on the next plane as soon as it does, which may be a Gucci-management protocol put in place years ago, during a decidedly less peaceful and focused chapter of the rapper's life.
The chaos peaked in the fall of 2013, when Gucci—then in the grip of a hellacious addiction to the opiate-laced concoction known as "lean," which he drank daily by the pint—went on a bridge-torching Twitter bender, boasting crudely about his and others' sexual escapades with well-known female artists, insulting Atlantic executives Craig Kallman and Julie Greenwald, and referring to Drake as a "male groupie." Gucci's 2017 memoir, The Autobiography, begins with what happened next. High and paranoid, Gucci emerged from the "brick prison" of his East Atlanta studio, armed and dangerous, and went on an IRL rampage whose particulars he does not remember. "I was the East Atlanta bogeyman," he writes in the book, "making my way through the hood one volatile incident after another."
Eventually a concerned friend called the police. Gucci woke up in a hospital bed; not long after that he returned, contritely, to Twitter. "I've been drinking lean for 10plus years," he wrote, "& I must admit it has destroyed me." By the time he went full bogeyman, he was already on his way back to jail after being caught with a .45 while on probation; in the wake of the September ’13 incident, he would eventually be sentenced to three years in federal prison, which he'd serve in the same Terre Haute, Indiana, facility where the government stuck Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
He endured withdrawal, lost 25 pounds in two and a half weeks as his body recovered from years of opiate-induced constipation, and began thinking clearly for the first time in a long time. "I had to deal with the fact that, man, I got out easy," he says. He'd been facing "serious cases" with equally serious potential penalties; comparatively speaking, three years was a light sentence. "Once I started to come to that realization, that this is my reality, ain't no runnin' from it," he says. "I just decided to face it."
Gucci was born Radric Davis, in Bessemer, Alabama, a coal town south of Birmingham. His grandfather was a former U.S. Army soldier who'd picked up a taste for fine Italian footwear in the service—the original Gucci Man—and his father was a charismatic hustler and an intermittent presence in his son's life. It was Gucci's mother, Vicky, who moved him and his half-brother to Georgia in 1989. Gucci began selling weed in seventh grade and slinging crack outside a Texaco station the following year, yet still managed to graduate from Ronald E. McNair High School in Atlanta with a 3.0 GPA and a scholarship to Perimeter College at Georgia State University, whose "notable alumni" roll-call on Google lists him ahead of former Braves infielder Nick Green.
He was arrested for possession in his freshman year; he'd always been into music, but after that first bust, it began to seem like a prudent career track to pursue. He wasn't looking to become a rapper himself—he figured his Alabama accent and slight speech impediment would hold him back, and anyway, all the rappers he knew were broke. He looked up to street guys who'd become moguls—Eazy E, Master P, Suave House founder Tony Draper, and Rap-A-Lot Records head J. Prince. He began managing the career of a friend's teenage nephew, who went by Lil Buddy, and began buying beats from a local producer named Xavier Dotson, a teetotaling barber-college graduate who worked under the name Zaytoven. When Lil Buddy apparently lost interest in becoming the Lil Bow Wow to Gucci's Jermaine Dupri, Zaytoven urged Gucci to rap instead.
Soon he was making mixtapes and regional hits (like "So Icy," which also launched the career of a hard-nosed MC named Young Jeezy) while still selling drugs on the side. Income from trapping paved over the rough patches in an early career complicated almost immediately by Gucci's legal entanglements, which, in chicken-or-egg fashion, were mostly due to trapping. In May 2005, he shot his way out of an ambush, killing one of his assailants; he surrendered to police on murder charges days before the release of his debut album, Trap House. The charges were later dropped due to insufficient evidence, but a pattern had been established; throughout The Autobiography, a stint in the clink seems to follow every professional milestone the way Tuesday follows Monday.
"It's very challenging," Gucci says in Miami, "to be an artist, a hip-hop artist, and be on probation, you know what I'm saying? Every time anything happens—you violated probation. It's hard to be on probation and travel. You gotta be so responsible. And at that stage of my life, I wasn't that responsible. It was too much for me."
He began making the most of his time outside the system, learned to freestyle without written lyrics, shuttled from studio to studio. Sometimes he'd rap with nothing in his headphones but a kick-snare drum pattern, letting his producers fly in the rest of the music after the fact. He cranked out dozens of mixtapes every year, occasionally stepping on the potential success of his official major-label releases; in his book, he cheerfully admits that giving away a free mixtape called Buy My Album a week before Warner/Asylum released his seventh album, 2010's The Appeal: Georgia's Most Wanted, was probably not his shrewdest move.
He hadn't set out to be a rapper, but now it was as if he couldn't stop; in the months leading up to his incarceration, he became even more prolific, listing his studio as his residence so that he could record while on house arrest and churning out mixtape trilogies that anticipate the 2018 trend toward chart-gaming double- and triple-disc rap epics. Much of that material is rapped in a voice furred by intoxication, and a lot of it is pretty dark. (See: The paranoid title track off his 2013 mixtape Trap House III.)
"It's like, 'Damn, man—that guy was going through some shit,’ ” Gucci says of his immediately pre-jail work. "I was just manic in the studio. I had shit that I wanted to get off my chest. I don't think it was so much that I wanted to give it to the world—I just wanted to get it out my head."
The hip-hop news site Pigeons & Planes recently suggested that Gucci has released more than 4,000 songs since the mid-2000s. That might be a slightly fanciful calculation—there's only 120 hours of music on his Spotify page, and many of those tracks are duplicates. But also, to discuss Gucci's catalog in terms of sheer tonnage is to miss the point; what's important about this music is how wildly consistent it all is. With his elementary rhyme patterns and stuffy-nosed vocal register, he was no one's idea of a great rapper in the mid-'00s, but he was always a memorable, irresistible one. Most of the time all he's doing is delivering blunt one-liners about slinging dick and dope better than the next guy—or a whole universe of next guys—but he delivers them with charm and flair, dialing street-life self-seriousness way back in favor of an impish sense of wonder, like he almost can't believe he's getting paid for this.
Also, in the decade-plus since Trap House dropped, the conversation around what constitutes "great rapping" has changed dramatically. Rap in 2018 is reckoning with its first real punk moment, led by kids born years after Tupac died, incubated on the Internet, and utterly disinterested in the opinions of the old-school hall monitors whose aesthetic values they're shredding with every blurted verse. Gucci's still just Gucci, but the canon has evolved to encompass him. His work always gnawed at the borders between weirdo and trap, rock star and baller, death trip and SremmLife, and sometimes it's as if commercial rap has mutated to mirror that termite aesthetic.
Gucci himself has always had a pop star's charisma, and there's no telling where he could have taken that if the vicissitudes of the criminal-justice system hadn't tripped him up so many times. But the irony is that he's become and remained untouchably cool in part because his legal troubles prevented him from maximizing that potential, which means they kept him from becoming Jay-Z. Barack Obama never put a Gucci Mane song on a summer playlist; when you land at Hartsfield-Jackson airport, Ludacris is there, on a sign, welcoming you to Atlanta, along with other local heroes like Dikembe Mutombo, and Gucci is not, and will never be.
It doesn't matter—especially not to him. When I see him in Miami, he's been working on his fifth post-prison release, which he's calling The Evil Genius. The title works as both a tongue-in-cheek joke about his zigzag career path—one big I meant to do that hand-wave over a host of false starts and bad decisions—but also an acknowledgment of his unlikely emergence as an elder statesman. He laughs when he talks about this last development, like he couldn't have planned it better if he'd planned it.
"I'm secure in my influence," he says. "I'm proud of what I did for the culture. I know I touched a lot of artists directly, and I know I influenced a whole different generation of artists—to feel like they're proud, to say, I'ma get in the studio and I'm just gonna rock out. Do it my way. And people gonna love it. That's what Gucci did."
Skinny, sober, happily married—to the cosmetics entrepreneur and fitness model Keyshia Ka'Oir—and seemingly full of radiant light, Gucci's become an improbably inspiring public figure, a beacon of serenity and gratitude for positivity-starved times. He's fun, whether he's showing up to present a VMA wearing the same pink-and-black-striped blazer Sufjan Stevens wore to the Oscars or Instagramming himself taking his first-ever dip in a natural hot spring in Iceland, documenting his journey from disbelief to delight—Ya boy Guwop in a lagoon!—and going instantly viral in the process. There's almost no trace of the old, deadpan-nihilist Gucci who once rapped about replacing his heart with an iced-out Bart Simpson chain; his physical and spiritual transformation seems so complete that in certain corners of the Internet, conspiracy theories that he was replaced during his incarceration by a Gucci Mane clone refuse to die.
Toward the end of our conversation, I broach the clone thing, asking if Gucci himself feels like a different person since his release from jail.
"In a way," he says, after a pause. "In a way I feel like I grew. I kind of morphed into a different person. Shed some of my old ways. I can say I grew up. I love the person I was, I love the person I am, and I love the person I grew to be. I tried to lose weight, I tried to take care of myself, change my thinking, my environment and associates—the ones that wasn't benefitting me. I guess that's the transformation everybody's saying they can't believe. But I can believe it."
I ask him if he feels, on some level, like people are disappointed that he's taking care of himself, that he's no longer racing toward a rock-star death.
"Yeah," he says. "Like they say—sometimes people kind of want you to fail. They wanna see you fall. I get it. People love to see tragedy. You going through the worst things in your life—for somebody else, that's entertainment."
The Evil Genius does not, at this time, have a five-year plan. But he's got a two-year plan. He's 38; in two years he'll be 40. By then, he wants to have tripled his personal fortune and completed the Atlantic Records contract he just extended to the tune of $10 million. He's just gotten his first passport, and when we talk he's getting ready to visit Europe for the first time at the end of August. Two years from now, he wants to be a "prominent worldwide entertainer," playing the kinds of overseas engagements his legal issues once made impossible. But you can tell it's not just securing the bag at festival dates in Europe he's excited about; he wants to embrace the world.
That's what's so affecting about the Guwop-in-a-lagoon video. It's funny because he's so earnestly surprised and enthusiastic when he slips into the water, and because of the way he bends the dictionary definition of "lagoon." But it's also a little movie about a man reborn, out of literal and figurative prisons, eager to experience the possibilities of a life he nearly lost, taking nothing for granted.
"I always wanted to go to all these different countries," he says, "and I couldn't go. It took me until now, 38 years, to be able to. Soon as I land, it's like everybody else is, like, ready to work. But to me, it ain't work. It's like, Damn, look at that building! Look at the cars! I just wanna go in a coffee shop. I just wanna see shit. I just wanna talk to somebody. 'Cause I've been waiting all this time to do it."
"I wanna go to Australia, one hundred percent," he says. "I wanna go to Australia and Africa. I wanna see the animals, see country. I wanna just ride on out. I wanna go take, like, a safari. Just show me everything."
Alex Pappademas is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.
Styled by Simon Rasmussen. Grooming by Heather Blaine at Creative Management.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2018 issue of GQ.
