So fans were a bit confused when a new Mane came home from prison, physically and mentally. For one, he swapped out his once-signature potbelly for a six-pack, having knocked a good 75 pounds from his frame. The dramatic weight loss caused many of the tattoos that cover most of his body to change shape. Even his iconic ice cream cone began to fade some, rendering it difficult to see in certain lighting. When he jumped back onto social media, his frequent Snapchat and Instagram posts painted him as sober and almost disconcertingly happy, flashing a white and toothy grin while hanging out blissfully with his fiancée, the model Keyshia Ka’oir.

When he spoke to his followers, gone too was the Alabama drawl that has so long defined his raps, and in its place was an affected tone falling somewhere between the British limo driver from the Grey Poupon commercials and a full-on mechanical man. There is an inherent air of irony to this voice, sounding something like a bratty child doing an over-the-top take on what he imagines a good kid to sound like. This would make sense given the circumstances of Gucci’s life at the moment. Everybody is looking, including, presumably, his PO, so he needs to be on his absolute best behavior. (If you’ve been listening to Gucci for a while you’ll know that the alternate accent isn’t entirely new — he employed a similar voice and persona on the interludes of the 2009 mixtape The Cold War: Great BRRRitain.)

But these changes were enough to get the crackpots cracking. In a usual internet case of reverse Occam’s razor, several people began to speculate that this new Gucci was, in fact, a clone, possibly planted by the CIA for reasons unknown. When Gucci outlined his lunch plans for the day — “Just fruit, veggies and water, very light” — one Facebook user commented, “This nigga on snapchat talking about ‘I want a fruit salad.’ NIGGA The REAL Gucci don’t want no fucking FRUIT SALAD. Bitch he like activists [sic] slushes …” That post has received more than 15,000 shares.

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As with everything that happens on the internet, the clone talk is more a running gag than a genuine conspiracy theory, and Gucci rightfully took it in stride when he heard the allegations. On Snapchat he made a formal non-statement in his fully stilted robot voice: “I am hearing that Gucci is a clone… I will neither support nor deny those accusations.” He elaborated later, in a day-to-day conversational tone a lot closer to his old accent, if just a tiny bit sharper: “It’s funny to me. I guess people ain’t used to me being healthy and taking care of myself and being happy, so I can understand why they shocked… I embrace it. A clone is like perfection. If I look like a machine or a robot then I’m doing something well.”

Joke or not, consider this — how tragic is it that so much of the world is, in effect, rooting for the delinquency of a great artist? Why treat healthy living and sobriety as a punchline or even a betrayal? It’s one thing to find pleasure through fuckery in music, it’s another to wish a lifetime of fuckery on an actual human being who is seemingly working his hardest to transcend it.

“What’s the use in having all the money if you gonna die and be unhealthy and be sick or diabetic or fat as hell?” Gucci says. “What you gonna do then? Fallin’ out, having seizures. That ain’t what I need to be, that ain’t the future I want. When I was on drugs so bad, I talked different. When I was smoking weed, a damn near pound of weed every day, I was congested. When I was drinking lean like crazy every day, I was out my mind. I was always sophisticated, but it ain’t even sophisticated now — it’s just a sober, a more conscious Gucci. And people probably ain’t used to it. It took a minute for me to get used to it. But they’re gonna have to get used to it because it’s here to stay.”