It’s like, let me try to capture the energy or the feeling I had when I made Chicken Talk, or Trap House, or The State vs.
In the gym, Gucci listens to “Quavo’s new tape, Project Pat, Future, Kevin Gates, 21 Savage, a lot of my old mixtapes.” His own back catalog sets a high bar: “I’ve put out so many different bodies of work that I’m competing with some of my own mixtapes. If they share one secret, it’s the formula for a bestseller. He’s half-joked about co-authoring something with Gladwell. “I’m thinking about writing another book,” Gucci told me when I asked him if he has any new business ventures in the works.
It will keep you going, and it keeps me focused,” Gucci tells me of his library – which also includes works by Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential author Joel Osteen, and Rob Greene, whose bestsellers include The 48 Laws of Power, and The 50th Law (written with rapper 50 Cent). “When a lot of things are going crazy and it’s a hectic day, you read something that you know is going to be the truth tomorrow and was the truth yesterday. He reads Malcolm Gladwell, whose 2001 The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference is one of the books he discovered in prison, and still turns to for “daily affirmations.” He and Gladwell began chatting on Twitter after Gucci’s release in 2016, leading to a 2017 YouTube Space “in conversation” between the rapper and the New Yorker staff writer – whose Giuliani-era advocacy of hard policing for minor crimes in Tipping Point makes the connection all the more surprising. “Anytime I go to Alabama I try to go by that house,” he says. He was surprised I made the pilgrimage – “You went there? What did you think about that money green house?!” – but keeps his beginnings close. Just a few minutes away, in the middle of 1st Ave North is number 1017: the 675 square foot house where Gucci was born in 1980. “PHONE 983.” Old Bessemer, a city so small that it only took three digits to call someone. On the street-facing façade of the Square Deal Bakery someone had re-painted a ghost mural that I imagined scintillated customers back in 1922: “FRESH BREAD & CAKES,” it read, a memory flash in the upper corner of a blinding red Coca-Cola sign. Every now and then small groups of teens pent up from doing nothing over here walked over there, to also do nothing. When I got to the intersection of Alabama Avenue and 19th Street North, time seemed to slow down. Gucci’s childhood home in Bessemer is just a two-and-a-half-hour drive from our house in Atlanta – I couldn’t not go.
“Whatever makes the movie come across as authentic as possible.” That only gets us to 2016 – a halfway point – and putting down Autobiography made me want to know Gucci now. Until I just let them go.” A movie adaptation is currently in the works with Paramount Pictures and Imagine Entertainment – “We’re still developing the script,” says Gucci, who is open to playing himself. The autobiography ends with the suggestion that the cycle is over: “Three years to replay things in my head over and over and over until I stopped replaying them. Underlying his admissions is a pattern of repetition, and withdrawal: Gucci makes headway in the world, then retreats, his East Atlanta studio – The Brick Factory – appearing as a fortress and shelter from the limelight he so aggressively sought. The book covers Gucci’s early life in Bessemer, Alabama, his middle school introduction to selling drugs, the development of his intertwined musical and criminal careers, and his arrests and time inside – all with humanity and seemingly without deflection, setting up the rapper as an antihero, and the reader to root for the villain.
“I don’t think I have the time, and I definitely don’t think they have the money.” The rapper knows how to entertain outside of music: it took me a beach day to read his 2017 New York Times bestseller, The Autobiography of Gucci Mane, a redemption tale written in such a personal style that it feels like a casual conversation turned confessional on a cross-country flight. “After I did the story in the lagoons, NBC stepped to me and asked if I wanted to do the Anthony Bourdain type thing,” he told me. When we spoke, I asked him if he would ever consider a travel show – “Gucci’s Grand Tour,” maybe.
Gucci Mane – aka Guwop, né Radric Delantic Davis – got his first passport this year, and I’d watch him take it anywhere.