In 2022, a grand jury in Fulton County indicted Young Thug and 27 other members of his YSL collective in a 56-count RICO case. The investigation, part of a growing trend of prosecutors accusing rap groups of being criminal gangs rather than musical acts, spans grave allegations of murder and armed robbery, but also the suggestion that wearing a sweatshirt with the word slime on it or rapping “red just like Elmo” is “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.” In almost every instance where the video or audio of a song is shared online, it’s referred to by prosecutors as a social-media post rather than a creative work. The racial (and possibly First Amendment–violating) underpinnings of this are obvious: Black artists in historically Black art forms have their every utterance cast as literal and incriminating, stripped of poetic license and divorced from genre convention.
One of the 28 people named in the YSL indictment was Sergio Kitchens, better known as Gunna, the College Park native who Thug signed in the mid-2010s. Gunna is a direct stylistic descendant of his mentor; there are times even today when he will punctuate a series of successive lines with a yelped “Yeah!” that makes you scroll through the credits to see if Thug provided additional vocals. Many fans first encountered Gunna on Drip Harder, his 2018 collaboration with Lil Baby, another Thug protégé, where the two seem to build on Thug’s work by deconstructing it — Baby embodying his buoyant improvisatory streak, Gunna the metronomic anchor. By the time of the RICO charges, though, Gunna was a star in his own right. His second and third albums, 2020’s defiantly plodding Wunna and 2022’s sanitized but sleek DS4Ever, both topped the Billboard 200.
Following the indictment, Gunna was twice denied bail ahead of a trial that was scheduled to begin in January of this year. In December, he entered an Alford plea, which netted him a five-year suspended sentence and a release on time served for a single racketeering charge. An Alford plea — where a defendant maintains his or her innocence despite entering a guilty plea — does not imply cooperation with the government, though it does often require the defendant to affirm a series of the government’s statements, including, in Gunna’s case, “YSL is a music label and a gang, and [I] have personal knowledge that members or associates of YSL have committed crimes in furtherance of the gang.” He has maintained that he will not testify against other YSL members, and recently reposted a QR code that Young Thug had shared on his Instagram. None of this has stopped rap fans and fellow rappers from labeling Gunna a snitch.
Setting aside the sociopolitical baggage of viewing rap through this lens, whatever scorn he faces from audiences is likely to be fleeting: for every “Y’all listening to a rat btw” there is a “call gunna ratatouille bc he’s the rat that cooked” or a “Gunna tape so fire I might wear a wire this weekend.” Still, the suspicion from his peers, acquaintances, and former friends hangs over a Gift & a Curse, the somber and solitary fourth album Gunna released with little warning or promotion last week. Across 15 songs — entirely solo, as is appropriate for its thematic concerns — Gunna raps, sometimes intransigently and sometimes tenderly, about sticking to moral codes, building generational wealth, and watching his bridges to the outside world crumble when he wants most desperately to cross them.
At its worst, Gunna’s music sounds like a royalty-free facsimile of the prestige rap from his era and the one just before it: beats maudlin and melodramatic, full of somber Pro Tools–preset pianos and the occasional, preening electric guitar. His vocal style, which allows for little runs of harmonization before stabilizing back at a monotone, makes him sound poised, and allows him to pulse through minimalist beats or fill out ones that tip toward the high end. But when the instrumentals grow anonymous, so does he; this flat affect has the unfortunate effect of neutering the narrative or musical momentum of his verses, making them feel like a series of concentric circles rather than one long arc. Take Gift & a Curse’s “back to the moon,” where a series of otherwise compelling thoughts about Gunna’s newly isolated state (“You knew this would happen, you cut off the crew / I’m talkin’ to me and not you”; “Rich enough to get put in a hole / Got a crew but I been all alone”) seem disconnected, his blunt, seesawing cadence acting like little crescendos that ramp up and peter out.
This leaves some songs feeling less than the sum of their parts. “born rich,” for example, feels flaccid despite its moderately urgent pace. Even more frustrating, opener “back at it” keeps seeming halfway interested in addressing Gunna’s legal situation (“Ain’t tryna sleep in no damn bunk / I’m supposed to be here making anthems”) before sinking, over and over again, into a morass of cliché. At its climax, over a preposterously overdramatic beat, he abandons his stand on principle to rap, “Asian persuasion, she’s fine / Hit that shit right from behind / I can go two at a time,” before the final verse is over.
Under the right conditions, though, Gunna ends up sounding magnetic, his brimming confidence and hyper-consumerism punctured by intermittent bursts of nervousness. This comes through most clearly on the astonishing “paybach,” where a line in the chorus about “shedding tears inside my large Maybach” — already a curiously stilted phrase — reflects the awkwardness of being accused of flipping on Thug when Thug isn’t around to confirm or deny any rift. “Switching on my brother, are you serious?” he raps, bitterly, before claiming that the “only person I fear on this world is God,” perhaps unconvincingly. It’s here where Gunna suggests his present lonesomeness has an upside, serving as a retreat from the chaos of his pre-prison life and a chance to return more focused. You can hear him straining to make this case, but of course, that’s the point.
Elsewhere, Gunna approaches the YSL case as an instance of clear spiritual struggle and impossibly messy logistics. As expected, lead single “bread & butter” laments the lawyers who “did some sneaky shit.” But the song grows more complex than a simple statement of Gunna’s solidity in interrogation rooms. “I fell for it,” he admits about his initial brush with prosecutors. “This time, I be prepared for it.” By the end of the verse those lines appear in, the clawing at Gunna’s flesh — by district attorneys, old collaborators, and those casting aspersions on his self-medication — is waved away poetically. “That’s just the way the devil dance,” he raps. On “idk nomore,” a song whose title suggests a man at the end of his patience, he raps about how months behind bars helped him kick his codeine habit, yet intensified his paranoia: “Lookin’ through that peephole,” he raps, “better hope it ain’t a hitter.”
Despite the conspicuous absence of most of the A-list producers who contributed to Gunna’s past releases — and despite those beats, like “back to the moon,” “alright,” and “born rich,” that make Gunna songs sound like interchangeable TV-sync fodder — the music on a Gift & a Curse is frequently exciting. Flo and Dunk Rock’s villain’s theme on “fuckumean” instills a sort of pulp-movie dread; “ca$h $hit,” where Flo is joined by X-Plosive and Royal808, is a familiar bounce turned mournful, a club record drowned in codeine. And though it teeters on the brink of schmaltz, Turbo and Yung Talent’s driving piano on “bottom” coax out of Gunna the type of resolve that lines like “Told my dog, ‘Let’s get back to this eating’” deserve.
While modern charting rules mean that several songs from any high-profile release are likely to perform well, nothing on a Gift & a Curse feels like an obvious hit. This does not seem to be by design — there are several test balloons — but it does end up serving the album, compounding the claustrophobia that already haunts it. Even when he skirts the subject, Gunna conveys the attritive nature of legal battles; clear wins and losses are secondary to the financial and emotional fatigue that sets in and never leaves. Given those circumstances, the flashes of pop ingenuity that dot the record are both eerier and more exhilarating than they would otherwise be, qualified and qualifiers at once. To step outside of the record’s text is to realize the relative ordinariness of Gunna’s predicament — a mundanity that might make his feelings of isolation counterintuitive, but certainly makes them more harrowing. If we are told that rap songs should be treated as 1:1 reflections of literal reality, a Gift & a Curse is a testament to how, in our legal system, all victories are Pyrrhic.
