MARIETTA, Ga. — It’s an early Thursday afternoon in June in this Atlanta suburb, and Keyshia Ka’oir calls out to her boyfriend, Gucci Mane, that breakfast is served.
Up in this airy house’s recording studio, Gucci — everyone calls him Gucci — smiles widely and makes his way downstairs, following the smell of a chicken-and-egg scramble. He smiles as she brings the plate to the table, smiles as he jabs a fork into it, smiles as she lovingly hovers over him.
But for the clink of the fork hitting the plate, the three-story house is quiet. Situated at the end of a nondescript cul-de-sac, it’s barely distinguishable from its modest upper-middle-class neighbors. Inside, though, the décor is Miami Modern: white marble, white leather, white piano, white Maybach in the garage, exercise equipment in the living room, palm trees on either side of the living room — inside the living room.
“It’s like you living in a forest,” Gucci said, still grinning.
Gucci is the picture of a man relaxed, sparkling even — warm, cheerful, peaceful. He’s wearing a red V-neck T-shirt, distressed gray denim shorts, a diamond chain with a diamond cross pendant, and a chunky black ankle monitor over a red sock sticking out of a spotless Air Jordan 4.
Gucci — born Radric Davis — is Inmate 65556-019 in the federal prison system, on house arrest, serving the final few months of his three-plus-year sentence for possession of a firearm by a felon. His projected release date is Sept. 20. This arrangement allows the most quietly influential rapper of the last decade to begin the work of reasserting his place in hip-hop’s hierarchy with a new album — “Everybody Looking,” out Friday, July 22 — all while paying the remainder of his debt to society.
Perhaps no rapper has had more near-misses than Gucci Mane, now a decade and a half deep into a fits-and-starts career. He is one of hip-hop’s most prolific and admired artists, and also one of the least predictable. The shadow he casts over Atlanta — the center of 2000s hip-hop innovation — and by extension the rest of the South, is long and constant.
He’s released perhaps 2,000 songs — his own and appearances on others — and for a spell in 2009, thanks to breakthrough hits like “Wasted” and the deliriously warped “Lemonade,” as well as guest verses on tracks by Mariah Carey and Mario, it seemed like Gucci might finally take his regional charm global.
Photo
The rapper Gucci Mane at his home in Marietta, Ga., in early July. CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
Gucci’s trademark is his flow: buoyant and melodic, with light comedic flourishes. He raps with a slurry intricacy that’s inscrutable to old-fashioned hip-hop purists, but holds consistent thrills. His rhymes take unanticipated turns, and he loves to hover over the same syllable, dropping it over and over from different angles.
He is also a logistical innovator, part of the first wave of rappers to understand that a steady presence via mixtapes (in the real world, and later, online) was just as effective a marketing strategy as the traditional singles-and-albums approach. And he is one of the most astute rap talent scouts in the country, having kick-started the careers of Waka Flocka Flame andYoung Thug, and catapulted producers like Zaytoven, Drumma Boy and Mike Will Made-It to wide renown.
From the early 2000s through the early 2010s, Gucci released dozens of mixtapes and a sprinkling of commercially released albums, and even had a role in the neon-gothic film “Spring Breakers.” Harmony Korine, the film’s director, said his longtime friend is “a pure artist in the way Sinatra was. He embodies the code and the myth, but also elevates it in this really weird way.”
Gucci’s mystique, skill, omnipresence and oddball instincts — in 2011, he had an ice cream cone tattooed on his right cheek — all came together to make him something like a folk hero.
And yet he would consistently fumble near the goal line. “Every single time that he was about to break through is exactly when he went back to jail,” said Todd Moscowitz, a member of Gucci’s management team. “Each and every time.” Since 2001, Gucci has been arrested at least 10 times — a medley of assault, drug and gun charges (a 2005 murder charge was dropped) that kept him in jail for much of the 2010s.
“It’s been tough to be a Gucci fan,” Gucci admitted in this first interview since being released to home confinement. “It’s been tough to be a Gucci friend, a Gucci sibling, a Gucci girlfriend or a Gucci partner. I done took people through a lot, man.”
That means incarceration, and also drugs. Before his latest sentence, Gucci, 36, estimated, he hadn’t been fully sober since he was a teenager — around 17 years: “I felt like I couldn’t make music sober, I couldn’t enjoy my money sober. Why would I wanna go to a club and couldn’t smoke or drink? I felt like sex wouldn’t be good sober. I associated everything with being high.
Photo
Gucci Mane (real name: Radric Davis), right, with a Fulton County, Ga., sheriff at a court hearing in 2013.CreditJohn Spink/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated Press
“In hindsight I see it for what it was: I was a drug addict,” he said. “I was naïve to the fact that I was numb.” He had been smoking weed and drinking alcohol since he was a teenager, and drinking lean (or syrup, the prescription-strength cough syrup concoction) since he was 21; sometimes he added ecstasy or prescription pills.
“I can’t say I felt happy my last six, seven years in the music business,” he said. “I was just numb. You told me that I was doing good or told me I was doing bad, you hated me or loved me, either which way I greeted with nonchalance. It was sincere nonchalance — like, I really didn’t care.”
He attempted rehab once, but it didn’t take. Near the beginning of his most recent stint behind bars, at the high-security federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., he decided it was finally time for a change.
First came withdrawal. “Death,” he said. “It feel like death. Your body just craving lean bad. Stomach tore up, can’t think straight. Just mad at the world. Temper so short, so violent, so aggressive. So just rude and toxic.”
After that, focus. In prison, Gucci stuck largely to routine, concentrating on prayer, working out and reading, especially the Bible and self-help books by Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra. He now flawlessly speaks the language of recovery and therapy. “I’m my own therapist,” he said. “I been changed from before I even got out. People seeing now the effect of how I started thinking from maybe early 2014.” He used the prison’s music service to keep current, and also for inspiration; Kodak Black’s “No Flocking” was a workout favorite (and the Florida rapper was one of the first artists Gucci collaborated with after his release).
And for the first time, he focused on health, shedding dozens of pounds, and turning a paunch into a six-pack. So drastic has been his physical transformation that the running online debate since his release has centered not on his music but on whether he’s a clone. (Gucci has played along, poking fun at this both on his Snapchat and in the video for “1st Day Out tha Feds,” the first song he released post-prison.)
Even while he was in prison, Gucci managed to remain prolific, releasing about two dozen mixtapes of unheard material, compiled at his direction by his longtime engineer Sean Paine. “He’d tell me, ‘S.P., I want to drop a couple of tapes this month,’” Mr. Paine said. “I had the hard drive. I’d go ahead and mix them.” Gucci made, by his estimation, more than a million dollars during his most recent prison stint — more, he said, than he spent on lawyers. One of the best songs on his new album is “Out Do Ya,” in which he asks his peers how they let someone “in the Feds” get the better of them.
Photo
Gucci Mane in his home studio, next to a wall covered in lyrics, many of which he wrote in prison.CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
Gucci was released into home confinement on May 26, a situation he described as “a blessing. It let me get my feet up under me. It ain’t taking me too fast.”
In part, that’s because he escaped a far more serious sentence. “I knew that these people was trying to give me 20 years, 30 years,” he said. “I dodged a life-shattering moment, damn near a career-ending injury,” he said. “What’s the sense of having all this money, all these millions of dollars and you sitting in prison and you can’t enjoy it?”
When Gucci was at his output peak, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, he wrote nothing down, freestyling everything under the influence in the recording booth. In prison he reverted to pen and paper.
In the upstairs studio of his new home, one wall is covered in white and yellow legal-pad paper full of raps he wrote while in prison, then mailed to Ms. Ka’oir for safekeeping. About half of the songs on “Everybody Looking” — which features Kanye West and Drake, both of whom reached out to Gucci after his release, a testament to his stealth influence — were written behind bars. “I made like a pact to myself: When I get out, no matter what happens, I must record these songs,” Gucci said. “It was so real when I wrote it.”
Those are the album’s tenser, stormier numbers, songs like “1st Day Out tha Feds” and “Got Robbed.” The other half of the album, which includes looser tracks like “Pick Up the Pieces (Outro),” was written in the first days of freedom. With the help of the producers Mike Will Made-It and Zaytoven, and the engineering work of Mr. Paine, “Everybody Looking” was entirely recorded in just six days. Within an hour of entering the house after his release, Gucci laid down the vocal for “1st Day Out tha Feds” to a skeletal beat. By the next morning, it was released to radio. It’s currently being spun by the two biggest Atlanta hip-hop stations several dozen times a week.
In Atlanta, as ever, there is hunger for Gucci, and he’s not inclined to let it subside. As he was eating breakfast, his stylist, Shun Melson, came bopping into the house bearing bags of new clothes. Gucci walked into the living room to survey the array: Balmain jacket, Burberry trench coat, Givenchy slides.
“I used to go in the mall and just look at this stuff and couldn’t fit it,” Gucci said, reaching for a pair of outlandish Prada sunglasses. “I wanted to lose weight, but if it took for me to stop drinking lean to lose weight, it wasn’t even a choice.”
Photo
Gucci Mane, foreground, performing at the Hot 107.9 Birthday Bash in the Philips Arena in Atlanta in 2009.CreditRick Diamond/Getty Images for Radio One
He produced a five-inch stack of money and called Mr. Paine over. “I need you to take this to my manager,” he said, peeling off half of the bills.
Two days later, Gucci left his house for only the third time since his release — the first two were for performances at Atlanta nightclubs — to shoot music videos in a nondescript studio in an Atlanta office park.
The room was hot, especially when the motorcycles used in one scene spun their tires out, but Gucci was intensely focused. This was the rare day when he and Ms. Ka’oir weren’t attached at the hip. For the first time, they’re living together, rather than shuttling between Atlanta and her home in South Florida. The two met in 2010, when he requested she appear in a music video — he had seen her in XXL magazine while he was in jail — and they soon began dating. “We had our ups and downs, ’cause I would mess up and do stupid junk, but she had my back through all of it,” Gucci said.
Ms. Ka’oir, who has 1.4 million Instagram followers, runs two businesses: one for makeup, and one for fitness equipment, including a waist eraser that both she and Gucci wear during their daily morning workouts.
To her, the new Gucci — the one that professes love for his girlfriend, the one that eats kale (if she prepares it), the one that smiles easily and speaks in funny accents, the one that sings R&B songs into his phone camera — is old hat. “The person everyone is seeing today,” Ms. Ka’oir said, “I’ve always known that person. This is nothing new for me.” She added, “He’s grown up now, like, ‘I no longer have to hide this part of me — either you like it or you don’t.’”
For all of Gucci’s emergent beatific calm and geniality, there is still a strong whiff of competitiveness hovering over him. When he was in jail, he heard “a lot of people imitating stuff that I did, and I was flattered by it.” Last month, he released a song called “All My Children,” in which he exults, “I love my kids!” On “Waybach,” a song from the new album, he raps, “All these folks impersonate me like Elvis.”
But where that might have been a critique coming from the old Gucci, the new Gucci is merely assessing the scope of his influence. Contemporary Southern hip-hop, particularly from Atlanta, feels cut from his mold of “quasi-comedic, abstract, nonsensical wordplay,” as Mr. Korine put it, from the electric eccentric Young Thug to the pugnacious rapscallions Migos to the schoolboy croon-rapper Lil Yachty.
And so, his legacy secure, Gucci can focus on himself — for now, a homebound life of sobriety (with random drug tests), followed by three years of similarly scrutinized probation, according to a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He has hobbies: He’s working on a clothing line, Delantic (his middle name), and recently filmed a fantastically loopy ad for the cult skate brand Supreme with Mr. Korine. Every morning he works out. Every day he eats well. Every day he gets dressed up, even if just to walk around the house.
“Anybody can do the stuff Gucci used to do,” he said. But he hopes his new choices will be just as influential as his old ones.
“Can y’all copy living how I’m living?” he asked. “Can y’all copy getting y’all life together?”
Up in this airy house’s recording studio, Gucci — everyone calls him Gucci — smiles widely and makes his way downstairs, following the smell of a chicken-and-egg scramble. He smiles as she brings the plate to the table, smiles as he jabs a fork into it, smiles as she lovingly hovers over him.
But for the clink of the fork hitting the plate, the three-story house is quiet. Situated at the end of a nondescript cul-de-sac, it’s barely distinguishable from its modest upper-middle-class neighbors. Inside, though, the décor is Miami Modern: white marble, white leather, white piano, white Maybach in the garage, exercise equipment in the living room, palm trees on either side of the living room — inside the living room.
“It’s like you living in a forest,” Gucci said, still grinning.
Gucci is the picture of a man relaxed, sparkling even — warm, cheerful, peaceful. He’s wearing a red V-neck T-shirt, distressed gray denim shorts, a diamond chain with a diamond cross pendant, and a chunky black ankle monitor over a red sock sticking out of a spotless Air Jordan 4.
Gucci — born Radric Davis — is Inmate 65556-019 in the federal prison system, on house arrest, serving the final few months of his three-plus-year sentence for possession of a firearm by a felon. His projected release date is Sept. 20. This arrangement allows the most quietly influential rapper of the last decade to begin the work of reasserting his place in hip-hop’s hierarchy with a new album — “Everybody Looking,” out Friday, July 22 — all while paying the remainder of his debt to society.
Perhaps no rapper has had more near-misses than Gucci Mane, now a decade and a half deep into a fits-and-starts career. He is one of hip-hop’s most prolific and admired artists, and also one of the least predictable. The shadow he casts over Atlanta — the center of 2000s hip-hop innovation — and by extension the rest of the South, is long and constant.
He’s released perhaps 2,000 songs — his own and appearances on others — and for a spell in 2009, thanks to breakthrough hits like “Wasted” and the deliriously warped “Lemonade,” as well as guest verses on tracks by Mariah Carey and Mario, it seemed like Gucci might finally take his regional charm global.
Photo
The rapper Gucci Mane at his home in Marietta, Ga., in early July. CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
Gucci’s trademark is his flow: buoyant and melodic, with light comedic flourishes. He raps with a slurry intricacy that’s inscrutable to old-fashioned hip-hop purists, but holds consistent thrills. His rhymes take unanticipated turns, and he loves to hover over the same syllable, dropping it over and over from different angles.
He is also a logistical innovator, part of the first wave of rappers to understand that a steady presence via mixtapes (in the real world, and later, online) was just as effective a marketing strategy as the traditional singles-and-albums approach. And he is one of the most astute rap talent scouts in the country, having kick-started the careers of Waka Flocka Flame andYoung Thug, and catapulted producers like Zaytoven, Drumma Boy and Mike Will Made-It to wide renown.
From the early 2000s through the early 2010s, Gucci released dozens of mixtapes and a sprinkling of commercially released albums, and even had a role in the neon-gothic film “Spring Breakers.” Harmony Korine, the film’s director, said his longtime friend is “a pure artist in the way Sinatra was. He embodies the code and the myth, but also elevates it in this really weird way.”
Gucci’s mystique, skill, omnipresence and oddball instincts — in 2011, he had an ice cream cone tattooed on his right cheek — all came together to make him something like a folk hero.
And yet he would consistently fumble near the goal line. “Every single time that he was about to break through is exactly when he went back to jail,” said Todd Moscowitz, a member of Gucci’s management team. “Each and every time.” Since 2001, Gucci has been arrested at least 10 times — a medley of assault, drug and gun charges (a 2005 murder charge was dropped) that kept him in jail for much of the 2010s.
“It’s been tough to be a Gucci fan,” Gucci admitted in this first interview since being released to home confinement. “It’s been tough to be a Gucci friend, a Gucci sibling, a Gucci girlfriend or a Gucci partner. I done took people through a lot, man.”
That means incarceration, and also drugs. Before his latest sentence, Gucci, 36, estimated, he hadn’t been fully sober since he was a teenager — around 17 years: “I felt like I couldn’t make music sober, I couldn’t enjoy my money sober. Why would I wanna go to a club and couldn’t smoke or drink? I felt like sex wouldn’t be good sober. I associated everything with being high.
Photo
Gucci Mane (real name: Radric Davis), right, with a Fulton County, Ga., sheriff at a court hearing in 2013.CreditJohn Spink/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated Press
“In hindsight I see it for what it was: I was a drug addict,” he said. “I was naïve to the fact that I was numb.” He had been smoking weed and drinking alcohol since he was a teenager, and drinking lean (or syrup, the prescription-strength cough syrup concoction) since he was 21; sometimes he added ecstasy or prescription pills.
“I can’t say I felt happy my last six, seven years in the music business,” he said. “I was just numb. You told me that I was doing good or told me I was doing bad, you hated me or loved me, either which way I greeted with nonchalance. It was sincere nonchalance — like, I really didn’t care.”
He attempted rehab once, but it didn’t take. Near the beginning of his most recent stint behind bars, at the high-security federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., he decided it was finally time for a change.
First came withdrawal. “Death,” he said. “It feel like death. Your body just craving lean bad. Stomach tore up, can’t think straight. Just mad at the world. Temper so short, so violent, so aggressive. So just rude and toxic.”
After that, focus. In prison, Gucci stuck largely to routine, concentrating on prayer, working out and reading, especially the Bible and self-help books by Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra. He now flawlessly speaks the language of recovery and therapy. “I’m my own therapist,” he said. “I been changed from before I even got out. People seeing now the effect of how I started thinking from maybe early 2014.” He used the prison’s music service to keep current, and also for inspiration; Kodak Black’s “No Flocking” was a workout favorite (and the Florida rapper was one of the first artists Gucci collaborated with after his release).
And for the first time, he focused on health, shedding dozens of pounds, and turning a paunch into a six-pack. So drastic has been his physical transformation that the running online debate since his release has centered not on his music but on whether he’s a clone. (Gucci has played along, poking fun at this both on his Snapchat and in the video for “1st Day Out tha Feds,” the first song he released post-prison.)
Even while he was in prison, Gucci managed to remain prolific, releasing about two dozen mixtapes of unheard material, compiled at his direction by his longtime engineer Sean Paine. “He’d tell me, ‘S.P., I want to drop a couple of tapes this month,’” Mr. Paine said. “I had the hard drive. I’d go ahead and mix them.” Gucci made, by his estimation, more than a million dollars during his most recent prison stint — more, he said, than he spent on lawyers. One of the best songs on his new album is “Out Do Ya,” in which he asks his peers how they let someone “in the Feds” get the better of them.
Photo
Gucci Mane in his home studio, next to a wall covered in lyrics, many of which he wrote in prison.CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
Gucci was released into home confinement on May 26, a situation he described as “a blessing. It let me get my feet up under me. It ain’t taking me too fast.”
In part, that’s because he escaped a far more serious sentence. “I knew that these people was trying to give me 20 years, 30 years,” he said. “I dodged a life-shattering moment, damn near a career-ending injury,” he said. “What’s the sense of having all this money, all these millions of dollars and you sitting in prison and you can’t enjoy it?”
When Gucci was at his output peak, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, he wrote nothing down, freestyling everything under the influence in the recording booth. In prison he reverted to pen and paper.
In the upstairs studio of his new home, one wall is covered in white and yellow legal-pad paper full of raps he wrote while in prison, then mailed to Ms. Ka’oir for safekeeping. About half of the songs on “Everybody Looking” — which features Kanye West and Drake, both of whom reached out to Gucci after his release, a testament to his stealth influence — were written behind bars. “I made like a pact to myself: When I get out, no matter what happens, I must record these songs,” Gucci said. “It was so real when I wrote it.”
Those are the album’s tenser, stormier numbers, songs like “1st Day Out tha Feds” and “Got Robbed.” The other half of the album, which includes looser tracks like “Pick Up the Pieces (Outro),” was written in the first days of freedom. With the help of the producers Mike Will Made-It and Zaytoven, and the engineering work of Mr. Paine, “Everybody Looking” was entirely recorded in just six days. Within an hour of entering the house after his release, Gucci laid down the vocal for “1st Day Out tha Feds” to a skeletal beat. By the next morning, it was released to radio. It’s currently being spun by the two biggest Atlanta hip-hop stations several dozen times a week.
In Atlanta, as ever, there is hunger for Gucci, and he’s not inclined to let it subside. As he was eating breakfast, his stylist, Shun Melson, came bopping into the house bearing bags of new clothes. Gucci walked into the living room to survey the array: Balmain jacket, Burberry trench coat, Givenchy slides.
“I used to go in the mall and just look at this stuff and couldn’t fit it,” Gucci said, reaching for a pair of outlandish Prada sunglasses. “I wanted to lose weight, but if it took for me to stop drinking lean to lose weight, it wasn’t even a choice.”
Photo
Gucci Mane, foreground, performing at the Hot 107.9 Birthday Bash in the Philips Arena in Atlanta in 2009.CreditRick Diamond/Getty Images for Radio One
He produced a five-inch stack of money and called Mr. Paine over. “I need you to take this to my manager,” he said, peeling off half of the bills.
Two days later, Gucci left his house for only the third time since his release — the first two were for performances at Atlanta nightclubs — to shoot music videos in a nondescript studio in an Atlanta office park.
The room was hot, especially when the motorcycles used in one scene spun their tires out, but Gucci was intensely focused. This was the rare day when he and Ms. Ka’oir weren’t attached at the hip. For the first time, they’re living together, rather than shuttling between Atlanta and her home in South Florida. The two met in 2010, when he requested she appear in a music video — he had seen her in XXL magazine while he was in jail — and they soon began dating. “We had our ups and downs, ’cause I would mess up and do stupid junk, but she had my back through all of it,” Gucci said.
Ms. Ka’oir, who has 1.4 million Instagram followers, runs two businesses: one for makeup, and one for fitness equipment, including a waist eraser that both she and Gucci wear during their daily morning workouts.
To her, the new Gucci — the one that professes love for his girlfriend, the one that eats kale (if she prepares it), the one that smiles easily and speaks in funny accents, the one that sings R&B songs into his phone camera — is old hat. “The person everyone is seeing today,” Ms. Ka’oir said, “I’ve always known that person. This is nothing new for me.” She added, “He’s grown up now, like, ‘I no longer have to hide this part of me — either you like it or you don’t.’”
For all of Gucci’s emergent beatific calm and geniality, there is still a strong whiff of competitiveness hovering over him. When he was in jail, he heard “a lot of people imitating stuff that I did, and I was flattered by it.” Last month, he released a song called “All My Children,” in which he exults, “I love my kids!” On “Waybach,” a song from the new album, he raps, “All these folks impersonate me like Elvis.”
But where that might have been a critique coming from the old Gucci, the new Gucci is merely assessing the scope of his influence. Contemporary Southern hip-hop, particularly from Atlanta, feels cut from his mold of “quasi-comedic, abstract, nonsensical wordplay,” as Mr. Korine put it, from the electric eccentric Young Thug to the pugnacious rapscallions Migos to the schoolboy croon-rapper Lil Yachty.
And so, his legacy secure, Gucci can focus on himself — for now, a homebound life of sobriety (with random drug tests), followed by three years of similarly scrutinized probation, according to a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He has hobbies: He’s working on a clothing line, Delantic (his middle name), and recently filmed a fantastically loopy ad for the cult skate brand Supreme with Mr. Korine. Every morning he works out. Every day he eats well. Every day he gets dressed up, even if just to walk around the house.
“Anybody can do the stuff Gucci used to do,” he said. But he hopes his new choices will be just as influential as his old ones.
“Can y’all copy living how I’m living?” he asked. “Can y’all copy getting y’all life together?”
*
