Gucci Mane’s ‘WOPTOBER’: A Cringeworthy Display of Painfully Mediocre Artistry

In dropping his album for free three days earlier than its scheduled Oct. 17 release date, Gucci Mane may have hoped to generate hype by surprising his fans. Instead, the subdued release of “WOPTOBER” categorically failed to engage the overwhelming majority of his 2.6 million Twitter followers. That’s the thing with Gucci Mane: You might know his name, but it’s unlikely you know his music—and if you do, it’s even more unlikely that you’ve gone out and bought it.

“WOPTOBER” is an appropriately bad title for an album that frankly falls short of achieving anything at all. The production is generic, and the lyrics are mind-numbingly repetitive. For the majority of one song Mane rhymes “time” with “time.” Perhaps the most stupefying aspect of the album is that a solid 10 out of the 13 tracks all run at the same exciting tempo of approximately 74 beats per minute, which might be a decent resting heart rate in an adult human but is decidedly tedious for 43 minutes of badly-produced drivel.

Throughout the 13 tracks of monotonous rap, there are numerous instances of clumsy phrasing wherein Mane tries to squeeze more syllables into the line that can happily fit. As such, the caliber of the verse construction is akin to that song you were forced to write and perform in middle school as part of a “fun” class project. What differentiates “WOPTOBER” from your seventh-grade tragedy, however, is the fact that Mane has no shame in releasing music of such uninspired quality. On “Love Her Body,” for example, Mane asks the question, “Do I love my bitch or am I in love with her body?” 16 times in a row. If he doesn’t know after the first 10 queries, it seems unlikely that he’s going to find out. “Right On Time” sees him repeat the lyric “right on time” 22 times per hook. By the 13th cycle, even Mane himself sounds bored.

As far as production goes, “WOPTOBER” sounds like it was overseen using only GarageBand and Apple Loops. In other words, the production doesn’t make Mane’s rapping any worse—there is a steady tempo, at least—but neither does it do anything to even slightly enhance Mane’s lyricism. Indeed, it would seem that production is one of Mane’s lesser concerns. This is Mane’s second album of 2016 thus far, and after July’s “Everybody Looking,” it is clear that with Mane, we should expect quantity over quality. In comparison to the production on his previous release, which had some elements of well-considered musicality, “WOPTOBER” displays only a vast plethora of uninteresting beats.

In releasing this album, Mane has simply failed to add anything new to the rap scene whatsoever: “WOPTOBER” is full to the brim of generic, repetitive narratives with little to no real substance. Sex, drugs and money are not revolutionary concepts anymore. Gucci Mane, despite what some might describe as his best efforts, has been far surpassed by his contemporaries.