“You know you’re killin’ this right now?” he said.
Killing what? I’d only rapped four bars. I wasn’t sure what Zay was talking about, but he wasn’t alone in his thinking. We’d already made a bunch of songs and nothing had gotten a reaction close to this. Zay started up the beat again and I regained my focus and finished the freestyle.
I’m back up in the kitchen workin’ with a chicken
You get 63 grams for like $1,250
50 pounds of purp, 50 pounds of midget
As soon as it’s gone I sell another 60
My baby need some shoes, my aunty need a purse
Summer coming real soon so I need a vert
I hop up out that van with that duffle bag
And if a nigga try me I’ma bust his ass
I’m countin’ up money in my living room
Birds everywhere, I call it the chicken room
Pills in the cabinet, pounds in the den
Attic full of good, basement full of Benjamins
Two AK-47s and a blowtorch
Couple junkies knocking hard on my front porch
A couple old schools in my backyard
If I don’t know ya I’ma serve you through my burglar bars
Gucci back bitch, yeah I’m back bitch
Did you miss me or miss my raps bitch?
This that new shit, that county jail shit
That seventh-floor Rice Street straight-out-a-cell shit
You on my shit list, I’m on the Forbes list
Since I’m a rich nigga, I need a rich bitch
I got a sick wrist, it cost ’bout six bricks
I’m on that slick shit, that Zone 6 shit
When I exited the booth every person in the studio had their eyes on me, looking bewildered. Zay had goose bumps. Holiday looked like he just watched me walk on water.
It was like I’d just spit the hardest shit these people had ever heard in their lives. I loved it. The song became “First Day Out.”
Making that song is one of those moments I’ll always remember. After what happened with “Make tha Trap Say Aye” while I was locked up things were feeling kind of funny between me and Deb, OJ, and even Zay. These were supposed to be my closest allies and I was unsure of where I stood with them anymore. The strain on those relationships went on for a while with Deb and Juice but when I made “First Day Out” with Zay, it reminded me this guy was my partner that I came in the game with. We were still here. I wasn’t about to anything change that.
Later in the week I was back at Metronome working with Fatboi, and for some reason I kept thinking about this line I’d laid down the night before while I was working with Drumma Boy at Patchwerk. I was stuck on it.
Rock-star lifestyle, might don’t make it, living life high every day clique wasted
?
“What you think about doing a song called ‘Wasted’?” I finally asked Fatboi.
“Wasted? Hmm. Isn’t that something white people say?”
Exactly.
I always found it funny when white people said they were getting “wasted” instead of drunk or fucked-up or whatever term that black folks used.
Fatboi saw the vision immediately. He ran with it. If we could take this suburban white slang and flip it and make it hood—that could be big. Then white America would pick it up and it’d bounce back into suburbia and we’d make this phrase hot again.
That line—Rock-star lifestyle, might don’t make it, living life high every day clique wasted—had been part of a verse the other night, but maybe it could be the hook. I started rapping it to Fatboi and he got to making a beat. By the time he laid the groundwork for it and I made a verse to go with the hook, “Wasted” was sounding good.
I called up Plies, another artist I’d kept in touch with during my time in the county. I told him I wanted him on the song. He was all for it, so Fatboi sent him the track. Five minutes later my phone rang. It was Plies.
“Gucci, this is gon’ be a number one,” he told me. “I’m ’bout to do my verse and send it right back. Go record a third verse for it, okay?”
I laughed. “Wasted” was shaping up to be a cool song, but Plies and Fatboi were a little too much with all this talk of a number one smash hit. So Fatboi and I got to work on another song. Then Plies called again.
“You do the third verse yet?” he asked impatiently. “I thought I told you this shit is out of here!”
I did the third verse and went on with my life. “Wasted” was hard and I’d definitely put it on the Writing on the Wall tape with Holiday. Beyond that I wasn’t thinking much about it.
Two months after I got out, I released Writing on the Wall. Two weeks after that I was performing at a club in Jacksonville, North Carolina, when the crowd started chanting for “Wasted.”
“Wasted, Wasted, Wasted!”
I didn’t even remember the lyrics to “Wasted.” I hadn’t recited it one time since the night I recorded it at Fatboi’s studio. But Holiday had it on his laptop and when he played it the crowd went fucking crazy. I fumbled through the performance, trying to remember how the damn song went.
Fatboi and Plies were right. “Wasted” was something special. It was obvious this song was destined for bigger things than my mixtape. I had a lot of songs going in the clubs then, but “Wasted” was kind of like “Freaky Gurl” in how the masses took to it. What Fatboi and I talked about in the first five minutes of working on “Wasted,” the concept of the song and what it would do, was exactly what had happened.
This had to be the lead single for my next album. Except I wasn’t on great terms with my label and there weren’t really plans for a next album. Ever since the dismal release of Back to the Trap House, I’d withdrawn from dealing with them. I’d just gone hard with the mixtapes. So I wasn’t too hot on Asylum and I know a lot of people there weren’t big on me either. Back to the Trap House was no moneymaker for them and the other thing was that at some point I’d dissed T.I., the biggest artist on Atlantic’s roster. The label wasn’t happy about that.
But “Wasted” required immediate attention. Plies and I had originally agreed to swap songs, but now that the record was booming he was asking for like forty thousand dollars for his verse. Negotiations between him and Deb went nowhere and a decision was made to remake “Wasted” without Plies and put Waka and OJ on it.
Waka and OJ both did hard verses but it just wasn’t the same. I hadn’t realized it at first but there was something about Plies’s presence on the song . . .
I don’t wear tight jeans like the white boys
But I do get wasted like the white boys