It’s a Saturday night and way too many people sat at their computers as their digital clocks rolled over to 10:17 and three count em’ three new Gucci Mane mixtapes dropped: Guccimerica, Brrrussia, and Great Brrritain.
This year there’s been plenty of Gucci mixtapes already and if you slapped together the tracks from the official unofficial Murder Was the Case and the Wasted EP, Gucci’s made a close-to-classic album before his actual official album even dropped (still TBA), but here we go, a trilogy of true-school rap album tight mixtapes that are also trap-rap batshit crazy. These tapes are ridiculous. Russian military song intros. Gucci joke-aping MLK. What the fuck.
No longer wandering around in his own headspace, Gucci’s actually interacting with hip-hop as a whole here. There’s an interest in this stupid “rap game” and it’s beyond beefs with Jeezy or dudes that owe him money and get a pool cue to the temple. He’s explicitly concerned with craft and style and all that good stuff, as he always has been, but you know, three conceptually-linked tapes, all landing at once, tends to announce these things extra loud and clear.
Gucci let the rest of the world name him a “great rapper”, he didn’t declare it prematurely a la Wayne and he didn’t speak it into fruition like Jay Z, he just kept rapping and rapping and rapping until he got comfortable, even cocky, with his style…and still doesn’t utter blog-hype hyperbole about being “the best”. On these tapes, Gucci’s not a termite rapper anymore, trimming around the edges of the same sounds and ideas with slight variation, he’s a big, obnoxious, can do anything rapper now.
When Killer Mike merges his own rapid-fire post-Ice Cube style with Gucci’s meter-obsessed rapping (Good Gucci example: Great Brrritain’s “I Be Everywhere”), as he does on “Street Cred” (Guccimerica), well damn. “Timothy” (Great Brrrtain, also) is just classic, street-tale storytelling rap, wrapped in tragedy. Listen to that last verse, which begins with a character who “don’t give a fuck no more” and “can’t even love no more” and gets worse from there.
What are your favorite Gucci tape trilogy moments? That’s not rhetorical either. Tell me. That’s part of Gucci’s dopeness. We’re all in this together, sharing these tiny big musical events.
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-”Overboard” review by David Drake from Pitchfork
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