Gucci Mane’s rhymes draw from his turbulent life. He jokes, “My flow so schizophrenic that I think I need a straitjacket.” Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Every time Gucci Mane gets out of jail, he likes to go straight to the recording studio—a habit that is acknowledged among his fans as a testament to both his work ethic and his turbulent life. On May 26th, it was time for another reintroduction. Freed once more, after serving three years in federal prison for illegal possession of a firearm, Gucci Mane went to the studio. Less than twenty-four hours later, he released a grim comeback track, “1st Day Out tha Feds,” sounding defiant: “I bend, don’t break, I don’t ask, just take / Black gloves, black tape, and I don’t play nor pray.”

He delivered these words in an unhurried slur: his warm Southern accent and peculiar enunciation soften the percussive force of his syllables, as if he were drumming with brushes. (A hard word like “straight” might come out as something gentler: “shkray.”) In a genre that celebrates resourcefulness, no one is more resourceful than Gucci Mane, who built his legacy not on mainstream hits but on a series of modestly successful major-label albums and a profusion of the unofficial albums known as mixtapes. New releases arrived every year—sometimes every month—and even though the guy on the cover wasn’t always available to promote them, listeners were drawn in by an idiosyncratic style that was as consistent as his life was not. “Gucci Mane is one of the most street guys I ever met,” Zaytoven, one of his longtime producers, says. “But when he raps it sounds like nursery rhymes.” Of course, these rhymes tend not to be child-friendly, or friendly at all: “Pissy yellow jewelry, pussy, don’t piss me off / Sever a nigga head off, cut a nigga feet off.”

This combination of menace and whimsy turned Gucci Mane into something more than a fairly popular rapper: he became a folk hero, the kind of performer who is almost as much fun to talk about as to listen to. Some musicians have a song or an album that they are known for, but Gucci Mane has been known primarily for being Gucci Mane, although he sometimes calls himself Gucci Mane LaFlare, or simply Guwop. (This last nickname may come in handy if he ever receives a threatening letter from the legal department of an Italian fashion house.) And in 2011 he acquired a new trademark, when he covered the right side of his face with a tattoo of an ice-cream cone, accented with red lightning bolts and one of his favorite interjections: “Brrr.” He later explained, as if it were obvious, that the image was a celebration of his status as “the coldest in the game.”

This summer, a new Gucci Mane has appeared, one so clearly transformed that some fans insist he has been replaced by a clone. Formerly a self-described “big fat rich nigga,” he emerged from prison looking lean and happy, flashing a newly white smile. On Snapchat, he posted a video of himself eating a well-balanced meal. “Yeah, this is kale right here,” he said. He says that he is sober after years of addiction to prescription cough syrup. And, at the age of thirty-six, he seems to be relishing his role as one of the most widely admired rappers on the planet, especially among his peers. Gucci Mane showed a generation how to emphasize intonation over enunciation, and how to deploy slight rhythmic imprecision to buck the stiff authority of the beat. His new album, “Everybody Looking,” is the product of a six-day recording session and, you might say, a three-year writing session: as an inmate, he passed the time by composing verses in pencil on a legal pad. The album’s only featured rappers are Kanye West, Drake, and Young Thug, all defining voices of the current moment, and all fans.

To celebrate his return, and his rebirth, Gucci Mane booked a night at Atlanta’s grandest venue, the Fox Theatre, a former movie palace with an ornate ceiling, decorated with trompe-l’oeil stars, and nearly five thousand seats, all of which sold soon after the concert was announced. He took the stage at precisely nine o’clock, shirtless beneath a sparkling golden jacket that reflected the lights above him and the flashing phones below. “Wsappenin’,” he said, grinning. “It’s Gucci, bitch!” The beat dropped, but for a few minutes he barely rapped, patrolling the stage while the crowd shouted his lyrics back at him. The concert was billed as “Gucci Mane & Friends,” and the surprise guests arrived roughly in order of popularity, building from local favorites like OJ da Juiceman to a couple of emissaries from pop music’s A-list, Future and Drake. One guest was a new friend: Fetty Wap, the New Jersey warbler behind “Trap Queen,” which was among last year’s most popular songs. Fetty Wap calls Gucci Mane his favorite rapper, and he followed an exuberant performance at the Fox by posting, the next morning, an even more exuberant Instagram video. “Yo, yesterday I met Gucci Mane,” he said. “I met motherfuckin’ Guwop!”

The concert wasn’t quite exhaustive—if it had been, it might still be going. In this room of admiring faces, more than one of which was decorated with an ice-cream cone, every song was a fan favorite, and no one seemed to mind that the guy rapping about being “geeked-up crazy” had changed his ways. Gucci Mane has disclosed, in interviews, that he felt “numb” during the drug-addled years when he was most prolific. So when he declares, at one point, “I done shook off all my demons—now I’m back to myself,” fans might wonder who, exactly, that is.

Gucci Mane, one of the greatest rappers Atlanta has ever produced, is himself a product of Birmingham, Alabama. His name is Radric Davis, and when he was nine he moved with his family to a rough apartment complex in East Atlanta, where his accent marked him as an interloper. (He once described himself as “a country boy and a city boy all blended into one.”) He was an interloper, too, in Atlanta’s booming hip-hop scene: when a local group scored a hit with a lighthearted song called “White Tee,” he and some friends recorded a fearsome remake, “Black Tee,” which was a paean to robbery; in an accompanying low-budget video, his face was masked by a black handkerchief.

Gucci Mane’s musical career has been inseparable from the criminal career that has frequently interrupted it, burnishing his legend while sabotaging his professional prospects. He says that he started selling drugs at thirteen, and so when, as a fledgling rapper, he declared himself “independent,” the implication was that he didn’t need record-company money because he had plenty of his own. His first real success, a 2005 gemophile’s anthem called “Icy,” almost ended his career, and his life. It featured another Atlanta rapper, Young Jeezy, and after the two men argued over its ownership a friend of Jeezy’s was found shot to death. Gucci Mane was arrested for the shooting, but he claimed that he acted in self-defense, when the man and some associates burst into an apartment to assault him; the case was dropped. In an interview afterward, Gucci Mane insulted Young Jeezy in characteristically vivid language. “The nigga shaky, like a earthquake,” he said. “Like a—what they call it? Quicksand. Stepping on quicksand.”