letz talk abt gucci mane

the R&B joints are dope -- yall are sleeping (aside from spotlight obv)

his verses on "i think im in love" are better than his one on "stupid wild" imo

i don't think of "i think i'm in love" as an r&b joint per se, the hook dude's line is used more like a looped sample than anything else - focus is entirely on gucci's lines. the bits where he echoes gucci are pretty amazing though. "i'm an entertainer baby but my name ain't cedric / i got cheddar et cetera so stop the rhetoric"

the beat on "stupid wild" is basically sick enough that anyone could be saying anything on it.

the beat on "stupid wild" is basically sick enough that anyone could be saying anything on it.

and they are

i'm an entertainer baby but my name ain't cedric / i got cheddar et cetera so stop the rhetoric"

this is the best line on the album and 1000x better than "I'm a grain gramp" or whatever passes for genius in this thread

you're an idiot

you picked the one line that hoos thought was lol in the entire thread instead of the ones j0rdan & i have been mentioning for ages

(no offense to hoos)

that line you posted is good but its not some crazy deviation from the mean here dude -- he has plenty of lines exactly like that on the album

jordan s said...

i think out of context, the songs in "for the ladies" stretch of the album would be okay (even "spotlight" is alright imo, i think it's most disappointing because there was already hard proof that gucci didn't need to try & meet r&b listeners in such a formulaic fashion) but when they're all bunched together they become a drag and i pretty much am just skipping over that section right now (though i assume once i digest the songs that bookend that stretch i'll be more willing to let it play through).

i think gucci definitely has an aspiration for making capital A Albums and the rapping in general on this album isn't as dense or showy as it is on his best mixtape stuff (saayy "wonderful" or "weird" or "she got a friend") with the exception of a few verses here & there, like on "gingerbread man" or "lemonade" or "bingo". the rapping on this strikes me as very driven by the desire to make statements of fact & to be clearer and more direct in his rapping not necessarily to have a wider appeal but maybe because he recognizes that he will have a larger audience and wants to show a "truer" portrait of himself.

i'm thinking of like, the first verse on "all about the money" or his verses on "volume"-- these, imo, objectively aren't as impressive from a lyrical standpoint as something like "wonderful" but i think they do succeed in fleshing out the persona of gucci mane to someone who may be playing a gucci album straight through for the first time. this may disappoint those of us who are already invested & have dissected his more knotty mixtape tracks, but i think this is basically an album with a bunch of songs like "first day out" where he raps with great force & confidence and builds on his persona. (whereas an insane lyrical workout like "wonderful" could come off to some as boring & impersonal in the way that say... AZ could be)

& i still think the album retains some things that were great about gucci from the jump, notably his ability to write pretty amazing & inventive hooks. also, i'm sure i'm not the only one who cringed when reports were coming out that he was working with guys like storch & jazze pha, so kudos to gucci for being able to get tracks from those guys that are the same style of beat that he has made his name on (same for his tracks with bangladesh which thankfully aren't post-"a milli" nonsense like that mario joint).

Monday, December 07, 2009

Jordan:
real talk, i forget that i can comment on blogs

David:
lol

Jordan:
the sb has hardwired my mind so i feel like i'm locked out of every internet discussion forum

you picked the one line that hoos thought was lol in the entire thread instead of the ones j0rdan & i have been mentioning for ages

― unicorn strapped with a unabomb (deej), Monday, December 7, 2009 6:07 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yep. That's pretty much how trolling the Gucci thread works

Jordan:
real talk, i forget that i can comment on blogs

David:
lol

Jordan:
the sb has hardwired my mind so i feel like i'm locked out of every internet discussion forum

― unicorn strapped with a unabomb (deej), Monday, December 7, 2009 6:22 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

aw

why is jordan posting by proxy? his take on the album is otm, anyway

jordan has been banned from ilx

yeah i more or less agree w him and def came to similar conclusions when "worst enemy" first leaked, i still think the R&B jams are really good although I probably agree that lumping them all together in the middle wasnt the greatest context for ppl

"kush is my cologne" has the greatest beat btw

i know i shouldn't complain considering it is better than i initially expected but i just feel that if he made a bunch of 'dope boyz'/'timothy' type tunes instead of shitty r&b things and toilet interludes it could have been our generations ready to die. instead its just a good album i'll most probably listen to 10 times before i just go back to writings on the wall

i think 'dope boyz' type tracks are prolly overrepresented on this! i mean what else are 'volume' 'bingo' 'gingerbread man' type joints? i still argue against the "shitty r&b things" argument even if shit is sequenced weird

but on the other hand i dont think id compare it to 'ready to die' at all -- im not sure his stuff really could be boiled down to a single album statement anyway, he's working w/ a wide variety of archetypal tracks, not one album-length narrative of unique songs, know what i mean? like, biggie's entire recording career is the length of one month of gucci's output, its an apples & oranges career scenario

ok, a use yr illusions of ready to die hardcore on 1 tape and dedication2 lol im on drugs and like wordplay on the other tape.

it could have been our generations ready to die

smh

oh ffs whiney

i'm not gonna piss on yall's parade anymore.

like u would recognize our 'ready to die' if we had one

i'd kind of like one tbh

the nature of the music industry, the rap game, pop music, etc are all so radically different now. never mind music itself & which influences have come to the forefront of popular rap

a new 'ready for die' is gonna be, by nature, entirely different from ready to die

this is sort of the problem ive had w/ gibbs & pill praise at some level is its all felt very invested in replicating something that has already existed & is part of why weve made a big deal about gucci around here is he feels like a refreshingly new blueprint

That makes total sense! However, I think the problem I've had--and dat fool Shiplo agrees to some extent--is that I don't exactly see Gucci as a new musical blueprint of anything. That could just be old man whiney talkin tho

yeah i more or less agree w him and def came to similar conclusions when "worst enemy" first leaked, i still think the R&B jams are really good although I probably agree that lumping them all together in the middle wasnt the greatest context for ppl

― unicorn strapped with a unabomb (deej), Monday, December 7, 2009 7:10 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

otm. seriously what the fuck is up with the pacing on this album? all of his mixtapes i've heard do such a great job of starting things off with epic, ascending synth hurricanes that get you ridiculously excited, while this starts with "guuuucci, gu-u-ucci" and then a skit, then gets drowned in r&b just when it starts to gain momentum.

im writing something right now that explains why what hes doing feels fresh (altho ive definitely mentioned aspects of it before on ilx & in the first piece i wrote on smshrimp) but for now i just think its worth pointing out that prior to him actually getting any press whatsoever i thought that he was doing something musically different from plies/gotti/similar rappers in the same vein, & i feel like his current popularity bears that out, that there is a musical basis for his bumrush of the pop charts this year

burrrrush

this is sort of the problem ive had w/ gibbs & pill praise at some level is its all felt very invested in replicating something that has already existed & is part of why weve made a big deal about gucci around here is he feels like a refreshingly new blueprint

― unicorn strapped with a unabomb (deej), Monday, December 7, 2009 8:20 PM (19 minutes ago)

and this is the problem i have w/ u always tryna contextaulize really good rappers like these dudes and getting all mad when they get the blogger love that your favorite artist doesnt get (yet). let good rappers be good rappers sometimes imo

i mean i 100% get what you're saying but the fact that they draw on different, more classical influences than yr guccis doesnt mean they're any less skilled

kinda dreading gucci's blog darling phase, personally

uh

its never been about my 'favorite artist' k3v its about hundreds of other artists

which reminds me RIYL pill, freddie gibbs, playboy tre

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_L44f1agGlTA/SxxDxG4migI/AAAAAAAABh8/n-uIFiGwXv8/s400/big_k.r.i.t.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_L44f1agGlTA/SxxDwyuftFI/AAAAAAAABh0/yoxG6p3m-P4/s400/big_k.r.i.tback_copy.jpg

i like this more than the playboy tre record, more than pill, less than freddie gibbs

i mean i 100% get what you're saying but the fact that they draw on different, more classical influences than yr guccis doesnt mean they're any less skilled

― k3vin k., Monday, December 7, 2009 7:45 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

its not about 'skill' its about honest, accurate criticism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB5o2J9YL-0

otm. seriously what the fuck is up with the pacing on this album? all of his mixtapes i've heard do such a great job of starting things off with epic, ascending synth hurricanes that get you ridiculously excited, while this starts with "guuuucci, gu-u-ucci" and then a skit, then gets drowned in r&b just when it starts to gain momentum.

― brooklyn we go ham (samosa gibreel), Monday, December 7, 2009 8:26 PM (18 minutes ago)

i find the r&b middle to be annoying too (tho i'm with deej in that i don't find any of them really skippable besides "spotlight"), but i love the way the album opens up. it's such a statement track for gucci, and the "dramatic" (for lack of a better word i guess) entrance was kinda an unaviodable way to go - dude's been dropping enough mixtapes now that it was obvious his first album in a minute was gonna have an ALBUM OPENER

kinda dreading gucci's blog darling phase, personally

― brooklyn we go ham (samosa gibreel), Monday, December 7, 2009 7:45 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

uh

― justin timberlane (Whiney G. Weingarten), Monday, December 7, 2009 7:47 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

if u think posts by me noz & s0derberg are, like, 'gucci's blog darling phase' yr kidding yourself ... in the blogs hes totally more an 'enemy' at the moment. wait til the diplo project comes out, tho ... & now that hes got an album??

yeah i mean...compared to the total saturation blogger obsessions w/ wayne or dipset at their peaks, gucci is really still a pretty minor niche.

its not about 'skill' its about honest, accurate criticism.

― unicorn strapped with a unabomb (deej), Monday, December 7, 2009 8:49 PM (2 minutes ago)

i can't speak for you obv but i just get the feeling you'd like them a lot more in a vacuum than if they were constantly being compared to other rappers doing different things - from what ive gathered your gripes are mainly "they're good and all but why isn't [this rapper representing this trend i'd rather see blow up] getting all the love?"

i mean be glad it's these dudes and not asher/drake/etc 08

but k3v there is no artist who i think deserves that much attention right now -- its more that i think the crit world feels really disconnected from a wider rap community, the kind that would probably also appreciate Gibbs if they heard him, but also wouldnt throw out their (for example) Gotti CDs in the exchange.

i mean obviously id rather it was these dudes than asher but i almost feel like thats a kind of weird allegiance in some ways -- especially when it comes to tracks that are sorta morally questionable like freddie gibbs pimping tracks. i mean u got a guy like too short releasing pimp raps with a groundbreaking & really strong style, or suga free, or whoever & its like -- well yah im not really on board w/ smacking hoes around but this dude is, love him or hate him, doing something different & *important*. that feels like honest criticism to me. But putting these dudes on a pedestal is devaluing 'style' as an attribute of what-makes-rap-work in favor of function

i mean its not that i think big k.r.i.t. should be up there either -- its more like, check out this 2nd tier of dope promising rappers -- i wonder which of them has the strongest future? & then analyzing what works & doesnt about their raps. but new yorker coverage for one of them feels like hes jumping his spot in line or something

if u think posts by me noz & s0derberg are, like, 'gucci's blog darling phase' yr kidding yourself ... in the blogs hes totally more an 'enemy' at the moment. wait til the diplo project comes out, tho ... & now that hes got an album??

― unicorn strapped with a unabomb (deej), Monday, December 7, 2009 8:52 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Oh no I know. I mean, i'm just saying we're kind of already at gucci level orange but gucci level red is def on the horizon.

i can't wait for the indie rock blogs to pick up on this and write about it in the embarrassing and hilarious ways they talked about Wayne/Dipset

yeah al & i (or maybe jordan & i?) were talking about how this record is more like gucci's "carter II" than his carter3, that the crossover wasnt coming as quickly as we expected

i can't wait for the indie rock blogs to pick up on this and write about it in the embarrassing and hilarious ways they talked about Wayne/Dipset

― justin timberlane (Whiney G. Weingarten), Monday, December 7, 2009 9:26 PM (16 minutes ago)

and it's likely that that'll be when most people start taking him seriously.

"Stupid Wild" sounds like "You Don't Want Drama"

http://www.thefader.com/2009/12/08/gucci-mane-dangers-not-a-stranger-diplo-remix-mp3/

so much hate