In my opinion, Brandon Soderberg hit the nail on the head;
Still, it’s hard not to feel very bad for the guy. Gucci’s scorched earth policy towards his career is a case study in the worst case scenario for what happens to a street rapper in the current rap climate where major labels hedge their bets, and the kind of creative gangsta rap Gucci makes can get nowhere near the pop charts. For a very long time, major labels assisted guys like Gucci Mane, providing them resources and promotion, and presumably, would help them when they were clearly addicted to drugs or mentally ill. Around the middle of the 2000s, at about the point when record sales were cratering and the Internet ruined and fixed everything at all at once, street rappers became nothing more than a liability. Their regional success, street buzz, and savvy ability to mine the mixtape scene and the modern day chitlin circuit of touring didn’t mean shit.
It is not a coincidence that street rap’s pop stars all ended up in jail in the late 2000s: Lil Wayne, T.I., Lil Boosie, Gucci Mane. These guys were no longer protected or assisted by their labels, because suddenly, dangerous rappers were simply not worth the investment. If you can’t get behind that — because yeah, all four of those guys certainly had a hand in their own incarcerations — consider Young Jeezy’s rocky, post-The Recession career (he went from dropping an album a year to constant delays), or the convenient rise of Rick Ross, who wears street-rap menace like a costume, but has none of the problems of guys who are actually from the streets. Rick Ross isn’t going to try to buy guns in a parking lot or throw someone out of a moving car.
