My decision to do all these mixtapes would change my entire approach to making music. Until that point I’d mostly written down my raps. Even when I was “freestyling” on the radio or how I did on Rap City back in ’05, it was always me reciting something I’d written.
It was actually a few months before Back to the Trap House that I first experimented with changing things up. I was doing a mixtape called No Pad No Pencil with Supastar J. Kwik. As its title indicates, No Pad No Pencil had a bunch of freestyles on there.
At the time I was working on it I was also shooting a documentary with Hood Affairs. I thought it’d be a dope idea to shoot me in the booth, hearing beats for the first time and just going in on them off the top. I was working with a young producer by the name of Mike Will and I told him to keep feeding beats into my headphones. Then I got after ’em . . .
Let me tell you like . . .
It’s just another day in the East Atlanta 6
Just a young nigga in the hood selling bricks
Just another nigga, just another clique
Just another girl, man you just another bitch
Just another day in the East Atlanta 6
You choosin’ me so you on the dope man dick
Yellow Corvette, that’s the dope man’s drop
Blue and white Jacob that’s the dope man’s watch
Bouldercrest Road, that’s the dope man’s block
“Dope man! Dope man! Can I please cop?”
Police tryin’ to tell the dope man “Stop”
The dope man thinkin’ “man, I gotta make a knot”
The trap kinda slow, I’mma make the trap hot
Waka Flocka Flame, tell bro to bring the chopper
I’mma throw, throw ya back, back, back to ’89
Moved to Atlanta, Georgia, I was just 9
Mountain Park Apartments, everybody on the grind
Then I moved to Sun Valley everybody had a 9
Went to school, 11, with a mothafuckin’ knife
When I was 13, I got my first stripe
Got my first stripe, it’s Gucci Mane LaFlare
Kush smokin’, Dro smokin’, put it in the air
Nigga this a Hood Affair, every hood, everywhere
When you hear this in yo car, you gon’ want to pull a chair up
Gucci Mane LaFlare, I be ridin’ in that Leer
I be so iced up, I be so kushed up
All I wanna do is be like Gucci when I grow up
All I wanna do is buy a pound and get dro’d up
All she wanna do is buy a ball and get snowed up
Tell her that I got her ’cause I know that she a shopper
Shawty want a 8-Ball, tell her call Waka
Shawty want a pound tell her Doe gotta her
I’m gonna serve her, chop her like a burger
Gucci Mane LaFlare and this track here murdered
—“East Atlanta 6” (2007)
I killed that shit! I’d just been trying to shake things up and do something different, but damn that came out hard. And I had so much fun doing it.
It wasn’t a calculated decision to switch my whole style up, but months later, with these new projects in the pipeline and deadlines to meet, freestyling proved to be a much quicker way for me to knock out songs. So that’s what I started doing and I did so relentlessly. I became a machine. I would record six or seven songs a day. Easily.
Even when I was writing raps down, my peers had trouble keeping up. That was something I’d first noticed in Zay’s basement years before. We’d start work on a song and I’d have three verses and a hook done before Zay finished the beat. When I started working with other artists and producers it was the same. I set a pace that few could match.
Now that I was freestyling, no one stood a chance of keeping up. I certainly wasn’t sitting around the studio waiting for anyone to catch up. One take. Play the next beat.
“Just track the drums and give me one sound,” I started telling producers. “That’s all I need.”
A lot of rappers need to hear beats for inspiration, but I never showed up to the studio with nothing to say. If anything I had the opposite problem. I was overflowing with ideas, which was why I was rapping on these unfinished skeleton beats, to get one batch of ideas out of my system and be able to move on to the next.
Sitting still in the studio killed me. I couldn’t do it. I always had something to get off my chest. I was always thinking about how I could phrase things in a way that would connect with folks. The producers could finish up the beats on their own time. You have no idea how many songs I made—big, well-known ones—that were nothing but a kick and a snare in my headphones when I recorded them.
My work ethic would pay off. With each mixtape I dropped, the disappointment surrounding Back to the Trap House faded away. I was getting hotter and hotter.
My mixtape run of 2008 would culminate with The Movie, with DJ Drama. Doing a Gangsta Grillz mixtape was always on my bucket list. But because of my issues with certain artists over the years I hadn’t pursued it. I had a lot of respect for Drama and I didn’t want to put him in a tough spot. Still, I always knew that we could put together something amazing.
Drama knew it too. He saw what was happening with my career. When the feds raided his studio in 2007 and he ended up in county jail for a night, niggas in there were telling him Gucci was the truth. Now every city he went to, people wanted to hear my music and he wasn’t going to be the one to stop them. And he had fallen out with Jeezy. So when Drama reached out about doing a tape I didn’t need to give it much thought. I’d been waiting on that call for years.
But before The Movie Drama and I teamed up for a mixtape called Definition of a G with Memphis rapper Yo Gotti. Definition of a G would serve as the announcement for the The Movie, setting the stage for something major to come. If Drama doing a tape with me wasn’t the nail in the coffin for his and Jeezy’s friendship, he made sure of it with a freestyle on the outro of Definition of a G where I rapped over the beat for “Put On,” a Jeezy song.
“You asked for it!” Drama boomed. “Gucci Gangsta Grillz on the way!”
I think I hit a new peak making The Movie. These were some of my craziest flows to date. I was in a special zone creatively.
Shawty hotter than a hippopotamus in the Sahara
With a rump like a rhinoceros just like Toccara
An ass like ass-trologist I need a telescope
I asked her what’s her Zodiac so I could read her horoscope
—“Bachelor Pad” (2008)
Drama did his thing on there too, sequencing the songs to put together one of my most cohesive releases. And he talked his shit throughout, sending little jabs and making The Movie a moment to remember.
You see, I used to be Sammy Jackson . . . Means I had too many snakes on my plane . . . But now, I’m Jack Nicholson . . . ’Cause I’m shinin’ on you niggas!!!
—“I’m a Star” (2008)