My Gucci Mane covers Paper Mag’s latest Beautiful People Issue. Check out an excerpt from the write up below and visit "Papermag.com" to read the rest.
Gucci Mane is in a visible and spiritual state of transition. The self-proclaimed “Trap God,” a title that’s hard to dispute, is basking in the afterglow of getting released from jail after serving nearly three years of what could have been a 35-year sentence. Just before he went in to do his bid in September 2013 for illegal possession of a firearm, the Atlanta rapper was allegedly (according to a police report) bipolar and off his medication, erratically making his way through his hometown of East Atlanta with a gun bulging out of his pants, menacing everyone he knew along the way. His stomach was bulbous from drinking too much lean, something he describes in his upcoming The Autobiography of Gucci Mane — he’d become dependent on drugs, a habit that smeared the responsibilities in his life — and when he was sent behind bars, his body collapsed from opiate withdrawal.
“I had a very hard time readjusting — detoxing off of lean is just a tough physical process on your body, with feeling bad and stomach messed up and body just going crazy because it’s something you had every day,” explains the 37-year-old, born Radric Davis. “It took a minute. But the thing is, with prison, you ain’t going nowhere. So it forces you. You gotta change. You gotta take it. It dried me out because I wasn’t going nowhere. I ain’t have no bond. What can you do? It makes you deal with it. It deals with you.”