The Autobiography of Gucci Mane

by Gucci Mane

  Mike Will did well for himself, though. Not only was he playing a major role in the rise of 2 Chainz and Future in Atlanta, but he’d also done a song for Rick Ross and Meek Mill called “Tupac Back” that was big too.

  His new moniker, Mike Will Made It, was a throwback to our first days of working together. I’d rapped it on a track called “Star Status”:

  I be freestylin’, not using no pencil

  Gucci Mane LaFlare I’m flowin’ on this instrumental

  Mike Will made it, Gucci Mane slayed it

  Star status nigga, everybody upgraded

  Coach arranged for Mike Will and I to get back into the studio together. But there was still lingering tension. Making matters worse was that niggas in the studio who knew about our past were cracking jokes and making comments. It kept the vibe fucked-up.

  It wasn’t until one day when it was just me and Mike Will at Patchwerk that we got back to solid. After that we were in sync. Mike Will had really stepped his game up since ’07 and he was giving me some of his hardest beats.

  His ringtone was “Ain’t No Way Around It,” one of the big songs he had with Future.

  “You gotta give me some shit like that,” I told him.

  “Yeah? Well, go in on this,” he told me, loading up the next beat.

  That song became “Nasty,” which Mike Will came up with the hook for. After doing my verse I stepped out of the booth and asked him who else we should get on it.

  “Future, bro,” he told me. “Future would snap on this.”

  “You love you some Future, huh?”

  The next day Future came through and hopped on “Nasty.” A couple of hours later 2 Chainz pulled up and the three of us did another song called “Lost It.” Afterward, Future and I were talking and he asked me what I thought about us doing a whole mixtape together.

  “Cool,” I told him. “Let’s do it.”

  Future couldn’t believe it was that easy.

  “That’s why I fuck with you, Gucci,” he said. “Ever since I got in this game shit’s never been that simple. But I asked you straight up to do a mixtape and you were down. Simple as that.”

  “No problem,” I told him. “We’re already here.”

  Not only did I fuck with Future’s music, but he was certified Zone 6 and that made me even more inclined to work with him. Also I liked what a studio rat this dude was. I recorded every day but I also hit the clubs at night and enjoyed myself. Future didn’t leave the studio. All he did was record.

  This guy’s work ethic was giving me a run for my money, so I knew the two of us would knock out a mixtape in no time. That’s exactly what we did. Free Bricks was out three weeks to the day I came back from jail.

  The tape with Future was a natural move. As was my next release, Ferrari Boyz, a joint album with Waka that we’d recorded earlier in the year. It was the collaboration I did after those two that would have people scratching their heads.

  I’d been approached by Joie Manda with the idea of doing a joint mixtape with this white chick from Oakland. V-Nasty. I didn’t know a thing about the girl, but when Joie told me these folks wanted to pay me a couple of hundred grand, I didn’t need to know anything about her. She flew in and we knocked out the mixtape in like three days.

  V-Nasty turned out to be a controversial artist, being a white girl who said “nigga,” but I thought she was cool and I enjoyed doing that tape. All I did was freestyle over twelve Zay beats. Business as usual. Easy money.

  •

  In September I pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery in the incident with the girl in my car. Even though I felt I’d done nothing wrong, my lawyer advised me against trying to fight it. After the year I’d just had I knew he was right. I was the boy who cried wolf by that point. Telling my side of the story would have just pissed off the judge.

  I was going to have to do a few months in DeKalb County again. This would be my fourth consecutive fall spent behind bars. Truthfully I was more bothered by the three years’ probation they were giving me for this. Almost exactly six years after I was first given six years’ probation in Fulton County, they were giving me three more in DeKalb County.

  Michael Corleone put it best. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.

  PART THREE

  XVIII

  * * *

  I’M UP

  I hadn’t been home a week when I heard the news that Dunk had been shot and killed.

  Dunk was supposed to be with Waka that night but ended up coming to meet me at a recording studio in East Atlanta where we were going to shoot a video for “Push Ups,” a song off BAYTL he was featured on. I hadn’t arrived yet when he got into it with some nigga, who pulled out a strap and shot him. I hated that it happened like that. I hated that Dunk was there that night because of me.

  Everybody knew Dunk as Waka’s best friend and he was, but he and I were close too. Nobody knows this, but whenever Waka and I were having our problems, Dunk was always the one to get us to patch shit up. He was the bridge between us. The mediator.

  I’d left DeKalb County earlier that week, determined to get my career back on track after more than a year of what had been one setback after another. All of that hadn’t broken me, though. I was ready to bounce back, but the sudden loss of Dunk could have easily sent me into another downward spiral.

  Someone who deserves credit for keeping me on track is Mike Will, whom I’d linked back up with shortly before I went back to jail.

  Everybody knows Zay is my go-to producer. The thing is since day one, Zay and I have been each other’s biggest fan. I’ll rap over whatever beat Zay plays me and whatever I do on there, Zay thinks it’s hard as hell. That’s just how it’s always been with us.

  Working with Mike Will is different. Even though he’s nearly ten years my junior, Mike Will is highly opinionated with his ideas. He lets you know what he thinks should be happening on any given album, song, verse, or hook. He’s a perfectionist. Mike Will will get up from behind the boards and walk into the booth to tell me what he thinks I should be doing differently. I remember Coach told him not to do that when we got back to working together, but Mike Will didn’t pay him no mind. The guy has confidence and is an asset in the studio. He pushes me.

  The week I came home Mike Will and I locked in at Patchwerk for the making of Trap Back The Return of Mr. Zone 6 and Free Bricks had been steps in the right direction, but I had hiccups having to go back to jail. This one was going to be my comeback mixtape.

  I’d written a bunch of raps in jail and started up recording those, but after a few songs Mike Will told me to throw that shit away and get back to freestyling like we’d been doing over the summer. Zay would never say something like that to me.

  The other difference between the two is that Mike Will would stay in the studio all night. From day one Zay has always been family first, so if we’re not working out of his crib, he’s doing a few songs, then going home. Zay doesn’t smoke, drink, or shoot dice and he’s not about sticking around while I record over other producers’ beats. If it was up to him, I’d be recording exclusively over his shit. Mike Will’s not like that. He’ll be there the whole night, regardless of whether it’s his beats I’m rapping on or Zay’s or Drumma Boy’s or Sonny Digital’s or whoever’s. And he’s always got an opinion on what’s going on.

  “Man, I don’t really like how you did those ad-libs,” he’d tell me. “You really need to do those over.”

  “I know you can make something harder than that. Let’s get back to the old Gucci.”

  There are not a lot of folks comfortable talking to me like that and truthfully I like it that way. Mike Will has me feeling like this shit is a job sometimes. Recording is supposed to be fun, and redoing verses and ad-libs is not my idea of a good time. It’s not something I typically do. But when we were working on Trap Back I could tell that Mike Will wanted to see me come back and win just as bad as I wanted it. He knew what time it was. When the tape dropped a month later the hard wo
rk proved to be worthwhile.

  “Trap Back is easily the strongest release from Gucci Mane since, possibly, 2008. On this project Gucci sounds clear, concise, and back focused on his career.”

  —AllHipHop.com

  “With Trap Back, Gucci Mane is back in his element. He’s removed himself from the curiosity of BAYTL and returned to the vice-indulging-laced lyrics and the system-shattering soundscapes that fueled his initial ascent. Bundle up.”

  —XXL

  “The other reason Trap Back is great is the increasingly prominent Atlanta producer Mike Will Made It, who continues to demonstrate that he has an ear for the smallest details that make a simple rap song a great rap song. His sound is like a Flubberized blending of Zaytoven’s 8-bit pings and Drumma Boy’s funeral marches: it’s menacing and playful all at once, which means it’s a perfect match for Gucci’s style. In a development that really shouldn’t have taken this long, he flips the Tetris theme into trap music for Gucci to rap on for ‘Get It Back.’ The instrumental could serve as a neatly boiled-down synopsis of Gucci’s style: simple, deceptively absorbing, maddeningly addictive, frantically paced. Drumma Boy also swings by, and Zaytoven contributes some of his gangsta tinker-toy productions. The result isn’t a revelation exactly, but it’s the most recognizably Gucci-ish Gucci release in some time.”

  —Pitchfork

  It was true. For the first time in a long time, I was starting to feel like me again.

  The biggest record on Trap Back was “Plain Jane,” which Mike Will produced and Rocko was featured on. This shit killed the streets. The love I was getting from the critics was great, but I was seeing the impact of “Plain Jane” in Atlanta and every other city I went to. It was fucking people up. It never got serviced to radio or made an official single, but to this day I can’t do a show without performing “Plain Jane.” It became an immediate fan favorite.

  The response from “Plain Jane” and Trap Back on the whole got me going again. I wasn’t where I wanted to be but I was on my way. Shit just felt like it was getting back. On top of the music I had gotten an offer to be in a movie.

  I had signed on to do Spring Breakers a year before. I was in Bloomington, Minnesota, for a show and was walking through the Mall of America when my cell phone rang. It was Mariah Carey.

  Mariah and I had gotten cool when we did “Obsessed” in 2009, but she had never called me out of the blue before. I knew that she was pregnant with twins and supposed to be giving birth any day now, so I wondered what could be so important for her to be calling me.

  “Gucci, do you remember Brett Ratner?” she asked me. “He’s the guy who directed the music video for ‘Obsessed’? He wants to put you in this movie. This could be a great opportunity for you.”

  Brett Ratner wasn’t the director of Spring Breakers, though. It was a guy named Harmony Korine. Apparently he was a huge fan of mine. He’d asked Brett, a friend of his, to get in touch with me for this role. Harmony’s name didn’t register with me at first but then I found out this was the guy who made the crazy, fucked-up movie Kids in the nineties. I’d seen another film of his too, Gummo. Both those movies were some dark, twisted shit but I’d liked ’em.

  Harmony wanted me in Spring Breakers so badly that he postponed filming until after my two little stints in jail in 2011, and he was going to pay me a whole bunch of money to play the role of Archie. Archie was the bad guy, the former friend turned foe of the main character Alien, played by James Franco. His name I knew. This was a major motion picture. I didn’t need to know much more. Sign me up.

  I spent two weeks in St. Petersburg, Florida, filming Spring Breakers. Harmony got his money’s worth out of me. I had no idea making a movie would be so time-consuming. We were working twelve-hour days and then I was going out at night on top of that for shows and appearances.

  The last scene I shot was my big sex scene and by that point I was exhausted. There had been pounds of this fake herbal weed on set, but that junk gave me a headache, so I stuck to smoking Kush and of course I was drinking lean too. It was four in the morning and even with these two naked bad bitches on me—one riding me while the other sucked my toes—I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I was knocked out, snoring in the middle of the movie set. Harmony kept having to wake me up for takes. Somehow I managed to wake up long enough to ad-lib what has got to be one of the best lines of that whole movie.

  I feel like you’re playing Mozart on my dick.

  Even though I was high as hell the whole time I did Spring Breakers, I got a lot out of that experience. To work with a director as talented as Harmony and play opposite James Franco in my first film was a blessing. I learned a lot watching James Franco do his thing. The whole way he approached his character was superimpressive. He was all in, fully immersed as Alien. He played the hell out of that role. He knew his craft like I knew the rap game.

  Working with the girls was great too. Rachel Korine shared her husband’s love for my music and Ashley Benson wanted to take a photo with my chain on. Despite crazy rumors that came out that something happened with me and Selena Gomez, we never even met during the making of the movie. We didn’t share any scenes together. Regardless, I appreciated her part in it. The whole thing was just a positive working environment. A good vibe. Harmony was a hard boss but it made for a dope movie. And he also turned out to be a cool person. He became a friend for life during our time working together.

  Spring Breakers inspired me to get on my Gucci Spielberg shit. Within a month of my return to Atlanta I started production on a hood comedy called The Spot, which I starred in and played producer on. I brought Boomtown on to direct it and had Rocko, Keyshia, and a bunch of local Atlanta comedians acting alongside me. I even got the two crazy white boys from Spring Breakers—the ATL Twins—to be in it.

  After that it was back to music. In May I put out another tape, I’m Up, because that’s how I was feeling. I was the old cocky Gucci again. I’m Up had a bunch of bangers on there with features from Wayne, Rick Ross, and Chris Brown. And this was just for my mixtape. The label wasn’t paying for these features and it wasn’t costing me a dime either. These people just wanted to work with me. I even had T.I. on that tape and he and I hadn’t been cool for years.

  I was in Patchwerk’s Studio A, putting the finishing touches on the tape. Meanwhile T.I. was in Studio B doing his thing. Between the two studios his bodyguard and one of my partners were shooting the breeze. They were longtime friends. Eventually my buddy brought Tip’s bodyguard to Studio A and a short while after that T.I. came in looking for his security.

  T.I. and I had not spoken in a long time. We’d had our fair share of issues, but when we started chopping it up it was like the first day we’d met on the set of the “3 Kings” video a decade earlier. Like me, T.I. had gone through a lot in the years since. He had spent time locked up and experienced his own ups and downs. I sensed we were both over any beef.

  We agreed to do a song together. Given our history, that would be something that would shock a lot of people. This was like what Jeezy and I had planned on doing but it hadn’t worked out. Maybe this time it would.

  I played T.I. two songs but he said he wanted something bigger.

  “Well, I do got a big record,” I told him. “But it’s already out.”

  “Let me hear it,” he responded.

  I played “Plain Jane” and then T.I. had me run it back and play it again. After the second run-through he was ready to go. He hit the booth and recorded a verse on the spot. I had already filmed a music video for the song with Rocko, Waka, and Mike Will, but it wasn’t out yet. T.I. said he’d be down to shoot a scene for his verse separately that we could put in there. The whole thing came together quick.

  At the end of the summer I flew out to LA with Coach for a business trip. It was a crazy week. Harmony and I met up to do some last-minute voice-over work for Spring Breakers and he let me check out a raw cut of the movie. The shit came out amazing.

  The next day I had an all-day photo
shoot for the streetwear brand LRG, and this was not a typical photo shoot. The company rented out this mansion where they had me doing all sorts of wild stuff—fishing out of the bathtub, eating from a huge pile of burgers, shooting dice on the marble staircase. This collection was called “High-End Lowlifes.” The concept was to have me doing all this hood-ass shit in a crib that defined opulence.

  I decided I was going to double dip on this mansion. I’d made this song “Fuck Da World” with Future and I had a good feeling about it. I was hot again, Future was coming up, and Mike Will had the Midas touch. Every beat he made was blowing up. All the pieces were there. Future happened to be in LA that week so I hit him and told him I had this crazy spot for us to shoot a video for “Fuck Da World.” The thing was we had to do it right now. Future put whatever he was doing on hold and came through.

  Of course I didn’t have permission to film a music video in this house and I had no intention of putting up the money or going through the proper channels to do so. I was just going to piggyback off this LRG shoot.

  When the whole mob showed up—Future, his people, the video production crew, the models—the homeowner and the LRG crew went crazy. But it was too late. I’d made up my mind we were getting footage at this spot.

  “Keep the camera rolling,” I told the videographer. “Don’t listen to what these folks say.”

  The most important part of that trip to California was my meeting with Todd. I wanted to show him I’d gotten my shit together and that I deserved a chance to make things right with the label. Todd and I had never had any sort of beef or fallout, but he and I had become distant after how everything played out with The Appeal. I’d been so embarrassed that I didn’t want to go to Todd until I had something to show. With Trap Back, I’m Up, Spring Breakers, and this next mixtape I had on the way, now was the time.

  “I’m sorry, Todd,” I told him. “I’m sorry for the last year and I’m sorry for the last album. I’ve cleaned myself up.”