Gucci Mane is the most influential rapper of the past decade

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Though he sits behind bars, Gucci Mane is all around us. He is the most influential underground rapper of the past decade, if not the most influential rapper point blank. Intentional or incidental, Gucci Mane's virtual exclusion from last year's VH1 documentary on Atlanta hip-hop is telling. That such a major actor was relegated to a footnote suggests his place in history remains contested. More damning—at least to the overlords who write popular music's most prominent stories—was his inability to sustain crossover success in the vein of Lil Wayne, Jay Z, or Drake, proof-positive of his marginal status. In the 1990s, platinum album sales empowered gangster rap both within and outside the mainstream. But by the late 2000s, just as internet piracy was reaching its peak, the very real enthusiasm for Gucci's work was much more ephemeral to measure—and easier to deny.

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The reason Gucci inspires so much writing here has to do with the nature of his art—that its impact has been so massive, yet operates by different rules, its relationship with its fans so historically unique. Though his albums have sold respectably, they haven't touched the numbers of rappers like Lil Wayne or Drake. Yet he became about as huge as a street rapper could be without ever transforming into a mainstream star. Some continue to argue that it's "just turn-up music"—a perspective that ignores huge swaths of the rapper's back catalog, minimizing him to the kind of cynical hitseeker who clogs up radio. This ignores the ways in which his multifaceted art is dense with narrative contradiction and limned in pathos. Recently, Gucci's music, while competent, is much less urgent than it was for the first five years of his career. Yet over the course of the past decade, he has remained one of hip-hop's most significant and central voices, an artist with a discography so vast and intricate we've barely scratched the surface, and whose influence tumbles forward like dominos through the new generation.

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