by Gucci Mane
It might sound like the judge’s warnings went in one ear and out the other, but that wasn’t the case. I’d absorbed what he told me. Those words carried weight. I was back in the streets, yes, but for the first time in my life I was thinking about what I could do to get myself out of this shit. My decision to pursue music was heavily influenced by my arrest at the Texaco.
•
I’d long had a passion for music, ever since Duke and I were in Bessemer listening to his boom box. Even after we moved to Georgia, Duke was the guy who was putting everyone onto the new shit of the nineties, from 2Pac and Kilo Ali to Spice 1 and Poison Clan. He was tuned in, always on the cutting edge when it came to rap. And I absorbed it all. My whole childhood I was running circles around everyone my age. It was like how I learned to read before my peers. Whenever a new artist or song blew up and everyone in school was talking about it, it was old news to me. My brother had been put me onto it.
As much as I was into rap, the idea of becoming a rapper always seemed lame to me. The rappers I knew—classmates who used to perform at the McNair talent shows—were all broke. There was no way I was going to be the nigga with a backpack riding the MARTA bus with a CD player and headphones, trying to get people to listen to my music. To me that was panhandling. I didn’t give a fuck if that’s what it took to make it in the music business. It wasn’t going to be something I did.
What was appealing to me was being the money man behind a rapper. I’d been heavy into Master P throughout high school. P was the consummate rap entrepreneur. No Limit was putting out albums every other day back then and I bought all of them just off the strength of P’s cosign. I would have never bought a Fiend or Mac or Mia X album, but I listened to all of the No Limit albums to hear what P was saying.
Even before Master P, I always gravitated toward the CEO, the person in charge. As a little boy in Alabama, I liked Eazy-E more than Ice Cube. I thought Tony Draper was cooler than 8Ball or MJG. I wanted to be more like J. Prince than Scarface. Later on when Cash Money started blowing up, I knew right away that Baby and Mannie Fresh were my favorites. The Big Tymers fucked me up for real. I liked the shit they were talking about.
I had a friend whose younger brother decided he wanted to rap. He was fourteen and his moniker was Lil’ Buddy. I saw potential in this kid and thought he could become a Kris Kross or Lil’ Bow Wow type. And I could be the money man pulling the strings. I decided to give it a shot.
This same friend told me he knew of a producer whom I could buy some beats from to get my artist off the ground. So one day in 2001 he took me to a house in suburban Decatur, where I met a twenty-three-year-old beatmaker by the name of Zaytoven.
Zaytoven was new to Georgia. He’d grown up in the Bay Area, and following his father’s retirement from the army, his family relocated to the South. Zay stuck around to finish high school in San Francisco but eventually joined his folks when he couldn’t keep up with the cost of living out there.
When he got here he enrolled in barber college, which was where he’d met my friend. Zay was a good barber but a way better musician. He had a natural ear, having grown up playing piano and organ in church. With that foundation he’d become a hell of a producer.
Today Zay’s sound is synonymous with the music coming out of Atlanta, but at the time that wasn’t the case. His beats were superinfluenced by his roots in the Bay. He’d come up studying producers like DJ Quik and making beats for guys like E-40 and Messy Marv while he was still in high school.
He was the oldest in a family of four children and I sensed he was the spoiled favorite. His parents had converted the entire basement of their new home into a recording studio for him to pursue his craft. I didn’t know what made a good studio or a bad one, but I could tell this setup had cost some money. It looked legit.
Zay and I could not have been more different. This was a guy who went to church every Sunday. He didn’t drink, smoke, or curse. He had nothing to do with the type of things I had going in the streets. He came from a religious military family and his folks had kept him on the straight and narrow.
Despite our differences on paper, we clicked off the dribble. I was feeling his beats and I ended up buying a batch of ’em from him for a thousand dollars. With beats in hand I was ready to get to work with Lil’ Buddy. But before I could do that, I had to report to DeKalb County to serve out my ninety-day sentence.
•
I get how for someone on the outside looking in, jail is an interesting place. Fortunately, for most people it’s a world they’ll never see. But the truth is that most of the time jail is just super boring. A whole lot of doing nothing. And when it’s not boring, usually something bad is happening. Something that ain’t really worth talking about.
Because it was my first offense, I was designated a trustee, which meant I’d only have to serve sixty-seven of the ninety days. I worked in the cafeteria and I talked a big game in there, telling the inmates I had my own record label and getting them to think I was established in the rap game. The truth was I hadn’t done a damn thing.
The sixty-seven days flew by. When I came home it was time to back up all the talking I’d been doing. But I had to go back to the drawing board. My plans with the kid hadn’t worked out. I’d only been gone two months, but that was long enough for a teenager to get distracted, decide he didn’t want to be a rapper anymore, and move on to something else.
Now I was at square one and out of the thousand dollars I’d spent on Zay’s beats.
I linked back up with Zay after my stint in the county. He suggested I start rapping and put the music mogul stuff on hold. Zay had seen me rap because I’d been writing the lyrics for Lil’ Buddy and then telling him how to deliver them, giving him the flows. Zay thought I had talent. I wasn’t so sure.
Not only did I have the stigma that rappers were all broke and lame, but I had long ago convinced myself that people would never take me seriously if I started up rapping.
It wasn’t that I’d never rapped before. Far from it. Even before my brother put me onto his music, I had an interest in poetry and the process of putting words together in creative ways. I can’t remember what I wrote but there was a day in first grade the teacher had our class make cards for Mother’s Day. Everyone else’s was on some “Roses are red, violets are blue . . .” shit, but I deliberated over that card until I could come up with something that didn’t just rhyme but captured how I felt about my momma. It caught my teacher by surprise.
“Wow, Radric,” she said. “This is how you really feel.”
I colored the card and brought it home, excited to give it to my momma over the weekend. I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about a rap career, but I did know this was something I was good at. Better than my peers.
After we moved to Georgia I’d spent a lot of time freestyling with my buddies in Sun Valley. Me and OJ would hang outside the apartments and take turns rapping while the other made a beat on the big green power generator. Me and my other friends—BP, C-Note, Dontae, Jughead, Gusto, and Joe—even had our own little rap crew. We called ourselves Home Grown. I always thought I was the best out of all of them. The thing was, whenever we would record our little ciphers on BP’s cassette player, I hated how my voice sounded on playback.
I sounded different from my friends. My voice was that of someone from Alabama, not from Atlanta. Not only did I sound so country, but I’d always had something of a speech impediment, like my father had. I’d gotten teased for that in school after we moved to Atlanta and it was another factor that turned me off to the idea of becoming a rapper.
But something kept me coming back to Zay’s basement, and the more time I spent down there the more comfortable I became. I was playing around with my voice, my cadence, and my diction and after a while all those reservations I’d had slowly started to fade away.
I was listening to a lot of Project Pat then. I was twenty years old, coming into my own, and while I was out there doing what I was doing—trappin’ out of cars with OJ and standing on
the corner hustling—Project Pat was the soundtrack. I had his debut album from ’99, Ghetty Green, on repeat. When a girl hopped in my car, that’s what she was going to hear.
I’d always been a big fan of Memphis rappers. Guys like 8Ball and MJG, Kingpin Skinny Pimp, Tommy Wright III, Playa Fly, and Triple Six Mafia. But Pat was my favorite. Still is. He was talking that street shit and I just knew he was telling the truth.
I knew that life, and I could tell if a rapper was playing Scarface. I had an ear for that. I knew Project Pat did the shit he was rapping about. Can’t nobody tell me different. I knew C-Murder did what he said. I knew Soulja Slim did what he said. I knew BG did what he said. Their music was real and it motivated me. My music had to be the same way.
P and Baby were my idols, but I couldn’t be rapping about Bentleys and Ferraris because I wasn’t living that life. The cars I was around were Regals and Cutlass Supremes. I couldn’t be rapping about shutting down the clubs because I wasn’t in the clubs. I was in the trap house. I was on the corner. I wanted my music to inspire niggas to get money and come up out of that shit, but at the same time I wanted to let them know I was one of them. I couldn’t leave them out.
Soon I found myself at Zay’s nearly every day. There wasn’t a plan. We were just two young men trying to find ourselves, in music and in life. We didn’t know the fun we were having would give birth to a whole genre and inspire a generation of artists after us.
Trap music. To some it’s the subject matter. Stories of serving fiends through burglar bars. To others it’s a style of beatmaking. Shit, today there’s a whole audience of white kids who think trap music is about popping molly and going to a rave.
In a way it’s all those things. But when I think about trap music I think about those early days in Zay’s basement. When I would go over early in the morning after a night spent juugin’ in my neighborhood. When Zay would mix our songs and he didn’t even know how to mix. The whole process was crude and unrefined. What we were making wasn’t radio-ready and definitely not destined for the charts.
When I think about trap I think about something raw. Something that hasn’t been diluted. Something with no polish on it. Music that sounds as grimy as the world that it came out of.
•
Eventually I decided to put together my first body of work. I bought more beats from Zay and another producer I’d met named Albert Allen. Al had been the keyboard player for the nineties R & B group Silk and he knew a lot more than Zay or I about the music game. He helped me put together the collection of songs that would make up my first underground release. But first I needed a rap name.
People had always called me Lil’ Gucci or Gucci’s son, so it seemed like a good fit to take on my father’s moniker. As for the release, I titled it Str8 Drop Records Presents: Gucci Mane LaFlare.
Str8 Drop was a crew I’d formed with my partner Whoa. It wasn’t a label as much as a group of niggas from my hood who were rapping. OJ was a part of this crew.
Al put me onto a place in the city that printed me a thousand CDs, posters, and postcards for Gucci Mane LaFlare and I hit the streets of East Atlanta hard with it. I was already a hell of a salesman and I worked my music into my day-to-day hustle, selling niggas a package deal for a dime of smoke and a CD. I would front copies to my homeboys and let them keep a couple of dollars for every CD they sold. It wasn’t long after I printed up those first thousand CDs that I was almost out of stock.
At that point I arrived at a crossroads. Was I going to re-up on Gucci Mane LaFlare and try to move another thousand copies or was I going to figure out something else? My next move would be a pivotal one, one of the smartest decisions I made in my early music career.
I brought the last of my CDs, posters, and postcards to the bootleggers on the Westside of Atlanta by the Oakland City train station. I explained I was an up-and-coming artist out of the Eastside and that I was trying to get exposure for my music outside of my neighborhood.
“I need you guys to sell the hell out of this CD,” I told them. “Whatever money that you get from it, it’s yours.”
“You sure?” they asked.
I assured them I was. To sweeten the deal, they printed me a few thousand duplicate copies of Gucci Mane LaFlare and posters for free, which I sold for two or three dollars a pop—all profit. More important, though, my music was now being pushed all throughout the state of Georgia.
VII
* * *
THE ZONE 6 CLIQUE
One day I was putting up my posters outside of Jazzy T’s, a strip club on Columbia Drive on the Eastside, when I was approached by a dude who introduced himself to me as Red. Like me, Red was a rapper from East Atlanta and he knew my music. He’d heard my album and admired my hustle. We chopped it up, exchanged numbers, and agreed to meet up and work on music together.
Red and I became fast friends. We soon formed a group we named the Zone 6 Clique. The cornerstone of the Zone 6 Clique was a pledge to be self-sufficient, independent artists. We took pride in the fact that we were hustlers first and foremost. We had money and didn’t need to sign to some label and get jerked over. This was a self-financed operation. Using profit from our dealings in the streets, we would fund and promote our own projects. But rapping wasn’t yet my priority.
My whole crew from Sun Valley was made up of hustlers, but Red and the rest of the Zone 6 Clique were on another level. Nearly everyone in the group was older than me. My game was petty compared to the shit they were up to. I was still picking up slabs of dope. They were getting powder by the kilo and cooking it up in trap houses. I was still a neighborhood corner hustler, slinging sacks. They were taking statewide trips, moving serious weight.
More than hustlers, they were robbers who targeted hustlers. They were robbing niggas for their stash and hitting big-time licks. They wouldn’t think twice about taking someone’s money on consignment—we’re talking up to a hundred thousand dollars—and just saying “Fuck it” and driving off with no intention of paying anyone back. They didn’t give a fuck about the consequences of pulling moves like that. They were more than willing to deal with them. Their whole attitude was bring it on.
It wasn’t long before I was doing the same shit. Finessing people out of their money came naturally. It was in my genes. I knew whom I could short and whom I had to give extra to. I knew whom I could give some bullshit to and tell them it was good. I could sense if someone was weak or scared. I could feel it and use it to my advantage. I worked every move I could.
Hit a lick for ’bout 50 stacks
Niggaz trippin’ talkin’ ’bout Gucci bring the money back
I rapped that line in a song called “Lawnmower Man.” It’s a line that got me notoriety in my hood. Because it was true. Niggas couldn’t believe I had the balls to talk about that incident on a track and it fortified my reputation as a rapper and a robber.
I started breaking into houses too. Not looking for TVs or jewelry or anything like that. I was after money and drugs exclusively. I’d target those whom I’d previously shopped with, and after gaining their trust I’d hide out and wait for them to leave their stash house before breaking in. If I couldn’t find it, I’d just sit in the house and wait for their return. Then I’d make them give it up. I quickly adopted the attitude of my new crew.
I accumulated enemies fast. My prey was my own hood. Even my closest friends from Sun Valley started distancing themselves after I aligned myself with the Zone 6 Clique, and those were not some soft niggas. They were superstreet too but they didn’t condone robbing and tricking people out of their work. I’d bring my new crew around and they’d be looking at my buddies from Sun Valley like they were a steak. I kept them off them but that was only because I was targeting them for myself. At one point I even ended up taking BP’s stash, and he was one of my best friends. That only alienated me from those guys even more. I’d become a slimy dude. My appetite had become insatiable.
In keeping up with my new partners I expanded my hustle beyond Eas
t Atlanta. I started going to cities, towns, and trailer park communities all over Georgia: Savannah, Milledgeville, Augusta, Sandersville, LaGrange, Brunswick, Thomson.
I also started taking regular trips to my home state of Alabama. I made that two-hour drive so many times. Sometimes twice in the same day because I’d moved the pack so quickly.
I didn’t care for being back in Alabama. Ever since I’d gotten a taste of city life in Atlanta the country bored the hell out of me. Sitting around a fire, eating pig’s feet, drinking, and shooting the breeze was not my idea of a good time. Everything in Alabama moved too slow. Everything, that is, except the money. The place was a damn gold mine.
•
Like Atlanta, the demand for drugs in Alabama was high, but unlike in the city there was a limited supply. For me that meant less competition and higher margins. The street value of everything was almost double what I’d make in Atlanta. So when I would show up in Birmingham with a couple of pounds of weed and half a ki of dope in tow, it was like Nino Brown was in town. I was bringing city ambition to these rural towns. A lot of these country-ass niggas had never seen anything like it.
My cousins in Bessemer trapped, so I made a good chunk of change in Alabama just off serving them. This was easy money but it brought problems. Inevitably my Alabama family discovered what I was up to. I was staying with my cousin Suge when my aunt Jean found the four pounds of weed I’d brought with me.
“Whose is this?!” she screamed. “What are you bringing into my house?!”
“Oh, Auntie, you know I like to smoke sometimes,” I told her. I didn’t miss a beat.
“Smoke?! You mean to tell me all of this is for you to smoke?!”
I can’t imagine my auntie really believed that, but Suge and I managed to convince her not to flush it down the toilet. We eventually pinned it on my other cousin Trey, who agreed to take responsibility for it if I broke him off a little something later.