Breaking: Gucci Mane Has Declared A War On Everyone

If you haven’t heard already, Gucci Mane is on the warpath. He’s been Tweeting nonstop for the last six or so hours, dropping names, making threats, offering to leak nude pictures of Nicki Minaj “for millions.” To the casual observer, he would seem to have lost his mind. But maybe he’s just lost his respect for everyone in the game. More on that in a second.

Over the last three days, he’s fired shots (via Twitter) at Young Jeezy, T.I, Yo Gotti, Waka Flocka Flame, Wooh Da Kid, Nicki Minaj, Drake, Frenchie, 2 Chainz, Keyshia Cole, Fantasia, Eminem, Migos, OJ Da Juiceman, Rocko, Cardo, Mariah Carey, Iggy Azalea, Ciara, Polow Da Don, Rick Ross, French Montana, Vanessa Satten of XXL, Craig Kallman of Atlantic Records, Julie Greenwald of Atlantic Records, video vixen Buffie the Body, video vixen Chyna Blac, former manager Coach K, former manager Debra Antney, former label Big Cat Records, former girlfriend Keyshia Dior, and others whose names I don’t recognize.

Some of these, like OJ Da Juiceman and Waka Flocka Flame, were allies of his for years, now alienated forever. Some of these, like Young Jeezy and T.I, are rappers that he’s beefed with before. Others, like Iggy Azalea and Drake, are simply coming out of nowhere, a result of his pure aggression needing to find something to crash into.

You can go to his Twitter and read the Tweets yourself, they’re wild. They allege everything from him having a threesome with Tyga’s girlfriend to him having sex with Nicki Minaj to French Montana having sex with Waka Flocka Flame’s mother. Sex, sex, sex, but they also document a fight that happened earlier between him and Rocko, the rapper of “UOENO” fame.

Rocko seemed to be mad that Gucci Tweeted about fucking his girlfriend, Monica, and so he Tweeted “IM OUTSIDE YA SPOT RIGHT NOW! WHERE U @ ?” at Gucci. 30 minutes of silence on both fronts, and then Gucci suddenly tweeted:

Everyone who knows me knows that Gucci Mane is my favorite rapper. My friends at the hip-hop site The Phat Startup tweeted me earlier: “@zach_two_times…as a fan, what you think happened?” So here’s what I think about all this.

Maybe it’s for publicity. It’s something Gucci’s done in the past, generating beef for attention. It seems that every time in the last couple of months he’s fired shots at somebody he’s had a project to promote: he reignited his beef with Jeezy the week before “Trap God” dropped, and he dissed Flocka the day his “World War 3” mixtape series was released.

While he does have new mixtape on the way, he always has a new mixtape on the way, and this is a whole new level of belligerence. He did Tweet, however, “I bet I have 2million followers by oct 17” on September 2. That was when he only had about 1.6 million followers, and he’ll have 2 million by the time this piece is published (Producer’s note: he does). So maybe there is a method to his madness.

But maybe he’s in the throes of a drug-induced breakdown a la Amanda Bynes. Gucci is unabashed about his drug use (“I’m a drug addict / bitch I gotta have it,” he said on “Trap Back”) and Waka Flocka Flame has tweeted “Kids please don’t do drugs @gucci1017 is the perfect outcome lol.” Maybe the combination of lean, molly, and weed he so often endorses has finally gotten to him.

Or maybe he’s just too real. He tweeted earlier, “Every 1 n the industry has a hidden agenda every person let greed n pride conquer them its sad but I been in jail so much it humbled me.” Tyga and Nicki Minaj—two victims of his Twitter rampage—responded to him by Instagramming a picture of him asking them to do features last week. Tyga didn’t reply, and Nicki texted Tyga she was “not interested.” They thought they were exposing him, but to me, they were proving his point.

Nicki Minaj has acknowledged how much Gucci Mane has helped out with her career—he was one of the first big rappers to do a song with her. So when I saw that she was unwilling to help him out now that she was bigger than him, I thought “Wow. She really did turn her back on him.” Maybe Gucci does have a point about greed and pride conquering people in the industry, and he’s fed up with it all. That’s why he’s calling everyone out.

It could be any of these reasons, and the truth is probably a combination of all three. But where does he go from here? I mean, he does have a huge underground following. He could keep putting out mixtapes that his fans would download and perform at shows that his fans would attend. It’s just that it’s going to be a lot harder now that he’s burned virtually every bridge in the industry. He also has a looming assault charge later this Fall that he eventually has to answer to, and with his criminal record, there’s no reason for him to be optimistic.

Reading these tweets, witnessing this implosion, I’m reminded of that scene from Scarface when Tony Montana’s girlfriend and best friend walk out on him, leaving him in his golden bathtub, alone. He screams in vain for them to come back: “Hey! Fuck you, man! Who put this thing together! Me! That’s who! Who do I trust?! Me!” I can imagine that maybe, Gucci Mane is doing the same thing right now, surrounded by loads of money but no people, Tweeting from his phone his hatred for everyone and everything.

But that’s what happens to the Scarfaces of the world. Tony Montana had a famous line, “even when I’m lying, I’m telling the truth,” and I’ve always felt that Gucci Mane is the same way. Even when he’s lying—and trust me, he’s probably lying about some of the stuff he’s saying—he’s telling the truth about who he is. As he says in “Little Friend”: “say bye to the bad guy / wave bye to the bad guy / Gucci Mane the bad guy / yes I’m the bad guy / wave bye to the bad guy.” He’s the bad guy, but that’s why we loved him in the first place.

This is what makes him Gucci Mane. The events of the last three days are simply just another chapter, one of the final ones, perhaps, in the life of Gucci Montana, the man, the mythos, the legend. The one who was ultimately too real, too authentic, too honest, in an industry full of studio gangsters all trying to be him.

And fuck—he’s still entertaining us.