Gucci Mane and DJ Drama, back in the trunk

The writing was on the wall for trap mixtapes when law enforcement officials raided the offices of DJ Drama’s Affiliates Music Group in 2007, arresting him and his partner Don Cannon and seizing more than 50,000 CDs. But the Atlanta rapper Gucci Mane, not one to be deterred, had already re-upped with Drama by 2008. Having previously established himself as a prolific force in the jackin’-for-beats, out-of-the-trunk mixtape economy that was now being dismantled, his 2008 tape with Drama, The Movie, the seventh he’d released that year, was among the first to put its stamp on a new model: the all-original, digitally distributed capstone project, low-stakes on the surface and yet legacy-defining. “I wasn’t printing up a lot of CDs, so the tapes just started to float through the internet. You couldn’t really feel who’s getting it or how they’re getting it,” Drama told The Fader in a 2015 oral history. “When I look back, that’s a tape that people consider one of the Gangsta Grillz classics.” Gangsta Grillz was Drama’s long-running mixtape series, which had a hand in breakthroughs for Lil Wayne and Meek Mill and reinventions from Pharrell and Childish Gambino. To have one was to be certified beyond the RIAA. Even as the realm over which Drama presided was abruptly changing, his stamp of approval seemed to retain its value.

Both Gucci and Gangsta Grillz tapes were linchpins of the 2000s trap changeover that brought chicken talk online, and each played a major role in the music’s move from street culture to a dominant strain of pop culture. Drama used to say that Gucci made trap music fun, bringing a kaleidoscopic, dazed whimsy to the gloom brought about by his 808 mafia, turning sour grapes to lemonade. For his own part, Drama was a different kind of trafficker and tradesman, getting out the product and spreading the word about it. Now, for the first time since 2010’s Ferrari Music, the two have reunited for a new Gucci tape, Greatest of All Trappers (Gangsta Grillz Edition), a callback to a bygone era and yet one whose reverberations are everywhere.

If the Drama raid was the first significant blow to the mixtape framework, the emergence of streaming in the mid-2010s was the finisher. Not only did the release-type binary begin rapidly breaking down, but there suddenly seemed to be much less use for the DJ as host, auditor or distributor of one’s project. Gangsta Grillz couldn’t sustain itself amid a shifting landscape that now prioritized studio polish, and Drama pivoted to fronting the Generation Now imprint that produced Lil Uzi Vert and Jack Harlow. The brand’s luster was unexpectedly restored in 2021 by a rapper who cut his teeth within the dying embers of the digital mixtape crucible as a teen: Tyler, the Creator, who recruited Drama for the album Call Me If You Get Lost. In the years since, Drama has been a hot commodity again, working with old heads like Snoop Dogg, Jeezy and Yo Gotti, as well as newcomers built for the format like Icewear Vezzo, G Perico and OMB Peezy.

His is a very specific kind of cosign. Some rap fans used to joke about Drama’s vocal presence on his tapes, filling what can feel like every second of negative space with barked slogans and shout-outs, as being intrusive, ultimately benign but still in the way. Tyler recognized the value in it: There are few characters in rap better suited to putting the battery in one’s back to pop off. Drama is among the best rap anchormen ever, more digital tour guide than headlining record spinner. The opportunistic DJ Khaled path of ultimate chart proxy never manifested for him, despite a few attempts, but this kind of thing suits him far better: standing off to the side, hyping someone else up and inflating their résumés, as if boosting a party member in a JRPG. On Greatest of All Trappers, he is entirely in his element as the man behind the man. He nominates Gucci for trap president (and elects himself the VP). He chimes in as the self-proclaimed “G.O.A.S.T.” (“greatest of all s*** talkers”) and slips in ad-libs. He is an interjector, a heckler, a pest; a gnat buzzing in your ear, only the gnat has a megaphone. You know the significance of this reunion because he keeps telling you.

Of the rappers who defined the reigning Atlanta trap triumvirate of Drama’s heyday, Gucci Mane is perhaps the least recognized — far less commercially palatable than his peers T.I. and Jeezy, in a time when airplay still defined success. Still, when you examine the younger trap stars that have followed, it’s his ethic that has most thoroughly saturated the formula. “All those dark crazy 808 beats, those are the ones he grabs for the mixtapes, where he’s like, ‘I don’t have to worry about radio’ and can go straight to the cars with it,” Coach K, Gucci’s former manager and founder of the Quality Control label, told The New York Times in 2010. And though he’s easy to tune out at this stage — releasing fewer projects and doing less in them — resting on laurels is part of the appeal of Greatest of All Trappers. “I had to find myself, I had to remind myself / Put the old Wop on the shelf, I had to rewind myself,” he raps on “Told Myself,” eventually adding, “And all my artists go platinum, but I can go gold myself.” That is the core tension at play here: knowing you’re bigger than the numbers say you are, understanding that those who have followed have deeply benefited from your influence. He totters between aggravation and pride in performances that assess what he gave the game and what it owes him. On “Questions,” he wonders if he’ll ever win a Grammy, and on “One Thing About It,” he laments not being shown the proper respect: “One thing about it, I birthed you n****s / But on Father’s Day, you ain’t say, ‘Thank you, n****.’ ” His money’s so big but it ain’t matching his followers, he snaps, while at the same time recognizing the inherent cultural capital in being the source code for so much taste.

You don’t have to look far to find many of Gucci’s core values reflected in modern trap. Take the new album by the Tallahassee rapper Luh Tyler, Mr. Skii: Its colorful artwork, snow theme and numbed delivery all recall a specific blueprint (or Burrprint), and songs like “Open the Door” and “2 Slippery” channel the sinister iciness and explosive pomp that were long Gucci staples. The 18-year-old Tyler first broke through in 2020 with “Law & Order,” where he set the terms of his music: “I’m with your b****, we at the Waffle House, yeah, we on Tennessee / No, I don’t trap but some of my n****s out here servin’ 10 a G,” he raps, drawing a line between the music and the profession. Mr. Skii continues to demonstrate how far the sounds of the trap have ventured from the dealer culture that shaped them: Tyler is far more preoccupied with doing drugs than selling them. But he also represents all the work done by Gucci as an A&R, signing Young Thug and signal-boosting Future and Migos, giving early credits to Mike WiLL and Metro Boomin. You can hear in Tyler’s flexible sound — sometimes playful, sometimes menacing, sometimes performed with a slouching nonchalance, sometimes with a snapping annoyance — all the work that went into making trap an aesthetic.

South Florida absorbed a different set of lessons. As rappers like Kodak Black and Lil Pump took trap’s sounds head on, the rest of the scene was forged by the wave of bass-boosted distortion drummed up by Denzel Curry and the producer Ronny J. The music that has come since has dialed up the aggression and darkness, skipping airplay and going straight to the cars, as Gucci once did. The Carol City mosher PlayThatBoiZay, who was elevated by a turn on Curry’s ZUU closer “P.A.T.,” fully immerses himself in this way of being on his new album, VIP. Gucci once rapped on “All My Children” that he was “Makin’ rockstars out of trap boys,” and Zay feels like a manifestation of that lineage. The hi-hat and bass kits of songs like “Cut Up” and “YOO” with JPEGMAFIA are put to pummeling use as Zay flings himself through verses. There is an anarchy to the songs that seems to embody the clobbering proto-punk-rap of former Gucci protege Waka Flocka Flame, but Zay never strays far from the raw, twisted challenges of his Raider Klan forebears and their many acolytes.

Far removed from the havoc of Zay or the stupor of Luh Tyler is Bronx rapper Cash Cobain, who, with Ice Spice’s recent retreat from pop’s center, has become the torchbearer for sample drill. Unlike Brooklyn drill, which is all about tectonic movement, sample drill warps lush soundbeds into gossamer. Cobain takes it even further, trading the hard-nosed downhill flows for singsong warbling. “Trap and drill really inspired me, but I wanted to add my own flavor. I didn’t want to bite guys like Southside and Metro. I didn’t want to capitalize off a Metro-type beat,” he told Billboard. His flavor is bittersweet, sultry and bewitching, a style you could unironically refer to as romantic, but it retains a hard exterior while splashing around in the autotuned soup that gives the modern trap sound much of its zest. To set the tone for his new album, Play Cash Cobain, the rapper unwinds a pleading sample that twinkles like a music box on opener “slizzyhunchodon,” while continuously doing face-swapping impressions of Quavo and Don Toliver in his own more delicate croon. In songs like “dunk contest,” “problem” and “fisherrr,” he is on a different plane than most drill, pushing toward an understated trap tenderness.

The rappers across the pond also know a thing or two about drill, and the U.K. and Brooklyn scenes have had a nearly symbiotic relationship throughout the 2020s, but that isn’t the only place that trap influence is felt. The Afroswing music forwarded by the rappers J Hus and Kojo Funds moves between Afrobeats, dancehall, R&B and rap (some of its earliest practitioners referred to it as “trapfrobeat”), and the Nottingham duo Young T & Bugsey ranks among the sound’s most effective specialists. Their new album, Beyond Rea5onable Doubt, embodies the “swing” of oscillating between sashaying sounds from the African diaspora and the barbed, charged-up sounds of trap. There’s a song called “Soca” that sounds exactly as you might expect, but much of the album follows a more subtly fusionist lead, as on “Grown Folk Music” and “Dundee.” On the other end of the spectrum, there’s “ABCD,” its trap-forward swank underscored by a trunk-rattling beat, and “Jiggy,” which feels so in the mold of something Gucci would rap over, his imprint may as well be frozen into it like carbonite. Even this far from home, this long since his best days as a machine churning out mixtapes in bunches, his image still lingers. Relentlessness has its payoffs.

Greatest of All Trappers is an obvious play on the GOAT acronym, cementing a legacy in qualified terms. More niche and less lofty, it isn’t the kind of title many would aspire to, and yet, for Gucci Mane, it feels just right. He likely still thinks of himself as the best rapper; I’m sure someone somewhere agrees, and I’m not discrediting them. But there is something powerful in finding meaning beyond the endless pursuit of the pantheon. Not all rappers need to pursue Mount Olympus; not everyone fits the careerist mold, or is built for the résumé rat race. The tape opens with a clip of NASCAR driver Mark Martin explaining how he got into the rapper’s music: “You couldn’t get him on — hardly anything on iTunes,” he says. “You had to go to DatPiff.com.” His tenacity as a cult hero, with a catalog built on the record industry’s periphery, feels like the more fitting assessment of his legacy and influence, of what he means to the game.

Drama has always been one for hyperbole, but he knows it, too: “Ayy, Wop, let me give you your flowers / You know you gave life to the culture,” he says to open the song “4 Lifers.” The sentiment wouldn’t be complete without the Gangsta Grillz insignia, Drama’s trademark logo carrying the authority of a hood presidential seal, sitting on the cover art beside an NBA championship ring adorned with Gucci’s signature ice cream cone in diamonds. Greatest of All Trappers isn’t legacy-defining on its own: It’s not a career crescendo like 4:44 or Michael, and likely won’t be added to the list of “Gangsta Grillz classics.” But it doesn’t need to be. The charm of it, for me, is that it unearths and luxuriates in a shared history, like old friends reminiscing over a dusty photo album pulled from the attic. It is only through this process of reliving and commemorating what was that it’s really possible to see the afterimage of what these two artists helped build everywhere, and realize that the spirit of the mixtape format is eternal.

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