After releasing a series of underground mixtapes and being nurtured by Young Thug, 25-year-old rapper Gunna was picked up for guest spots by Mariah Carey, Travis Scott and Future in 2018, and hit the US Top 5 via one of his collaborations with fellow Atlantan Lil Baby: the beautifully melancholic Drip Too Hard. He thus enters 2019 as one of America’s most-fancied MCs, and this debut solo album – thoughtful, affecting and quietly proud – justifies the hype.
The Young Thug influence is admittedly clear: while Gunna doesn’t have the same wizened vocal idiosyncrasies, he shares his rather disconsolate bearing. If you read the lyrics on their own, you’d think he was as triumphant as a turned-up pop rapper: it’s a roll-call of material success, including an endless stream of “foreigns”, continuing the ongoing rapper fetish for non-US cars that must have General Motors’ marketing department covered in anxious Post-Its. But delivered in that plaintive tone, he suggests a man either dismayed at the spiritual void in his newfound wealth, or one damaged by the struggles that came before it. “Sometimes a gangsta need a hug,” he admits on Who You Foolin’; “We locked in the ghetto forever” asserts Lil Baby on Derek Fisher, despite having revelled in diamonds and cars at the start of his guest verse.
These tracks are delivered in the Atlanta style of obsessively repeated single melodies, whose seductive monotony enhances the sense of a downbeat quest for meaning. Gunna deploys another Atlantan innovation, the ad-libs of Migos where the final word of each line is emphatically repeated, but gives it a powerful spin. He stretches the ad-libs out and overlaps them, letting them spill into the next bar: the effect, as on the nominatively deterministic track Outstanding, is an impressionistic swim of words, further blurred by his smudged enunciation. Gunna is known for championing the slang term “drip” to describe his ever-stylish garms; his delivery chimes perfectly with the aquatic metaphor.
The production by Wheezy and Turbo the Great is exceptional, adding delicate string flourishes – like a koto, or an echoing guitar that sounds like Arthur Russell’s cello – to the spacious trap architecture. The result is a gentle, poised record: the perfect rap album for a bruised America.
