Tuesday, July 26, 2016
RAP WILL EAT ITSELF (OR: TO SERVE GUCCI MANE)
No Limit nostalgia may have reached its fever pitch with Usher and Young Thug's Billboard-charting paean to the golden age of The Tank. Time to move on. Today's accelerated culture is ripe for an outbreak of Gucci Mane nostalgia. If "Swing My Door" is any indication, it's only a matter of time before young rappers, no longer content to merely run with his style, sink their talons into the themes, titles, and ad libs of his back catalog.
No Limit and Cash Money nostalgia consisted mainly of millenials reaching out toward a faded era of their youth. That the artists and music were accessories rather than actors is obvious if one remembers that people still don't give a shit about what Turk is doing. Gucci is as wanted and desired as he's ever been.
What fuels the nostalgia? Retrospective appreciation for his 2008 and 2009 hot streak? Anxiety that the drug-addled pudgeball we all loved is irrevocably changed? Or is it the persistent suspicion that the original model Radric Davis was murdered and cloned by the Bilderberg Group? Soon, perhaps, our nostalgia for the Original Gucci Mane will be all that remains—assuming, of course, they leave our memories unaltered. Hang on to your tinfoil snapbacks, folks.
Nostalgia trip #2: In the song's latter half, a bunch of MPA Weed Carriers trade verses like they're taking it back to the leather-man era. Rap: the only context where finishing each other's sentences isn't totally lame.
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Probably the most sure-fire way to inspire nostalgia is disappear like most No Limit and Cash Money artists did so quickly after their peak, leaving their fans blue-balled for years until they can't help but shout nostalgia for what feels like time cut short. Gucci never really disappeared, even while he was locked up we got more material from him than most other rappers during that time, so he may have sabotaged his own nostalgia movement with that strategy for better or worse.
ReplyDeleteHowever, to your point, Thug did release a tape called "I'm Up" this year, and while it bore no stylistic similarity to Gucci's of the same name, it's hard not to assume the title is a direct reference.
Hmmm, never made the connection between Gucci's I'm Up and Thug's.
ReplyDeleteMost of the No Limit guys faded away (or died, or were incarcerated), but it's hard to say the same about Cash Money when Wayne is Wayne and Baby is one of the biggest memes of 2016. Then you have guys like Fiend and Juvenile still making solid music for their core fans. I think it's really just nostalgia for the whole aesthetic: style, production, album art, and slang working off each other in a way no one had ever encountered before.