Freddie Gibbs Was Always Weirder Than We Thought

“Skinny Suge,” the penultimate track on last year’s “Alfredo,” Gibbs’s taut collaboration with producer the Alchemist, underscores his artistic ethos: It’s a grim story of survival narrated over an instrumental that’s more art-house than gangsta rap. The song takes us back to 2007. When Gibbs’s record label drops him, he returns to his hometown Gary, Ind., and sells drugs to keep his career afloat. The label is calling for its money back, as is Gibbs’s supplier. As he scrambles to teach himself how to cook crack, he learns that the promoters for his upcoming show don’t have any money for him, either. “These losses set me back, man,” he spits. “I’m literally sellin’ dope to rap.”

But as with most of “Alfredo,” the Alchemist’s production on “Skinny Suge” exists in its own universe, coming out of left field to counterbalance Gibbs’s grimy storytelling. Here, the Alchemist conjures a doodling steel-guitar loop that writhes above a shuffling boom-bap beat. Sometimes it slides into sync with the rapping, but often the two are at odds. Still, Gibbs finds a way to land line after line with the tenacity of a snarling street fighter, though one dressed in silk.

“Alfredo” is Gibbs’s eighth studio album; counting his mixtapes and EPs, it’s around his 20th project over the past 15 years. He has never had a hit nor has he ever fit in with any particular sound or movement. Instead he flits in and out of rap crews, record labels and musical eras. It’s somewhat remarkable, then, that “Alfredo” — a 35-minute exhibition of lyrical flamethrowing that demands a one-gulp listen — is serving as an inflection point for the rapper. The album garnered Gibbs his first Grammy nomination — for Best Rap Album — and reached No. 15 on the Billboard 200 chart, a career best. Maybe it took a year with nothing to do for the rest of the world to register the dynamism of an artist whose every move requires his listener’s full attention. But if Gibbs ever doubted that he would get here, he has never shown it. All he had to do, as he raps on “Skinny Suge,” was “put down the crack, bet on myself.”

Jackson Howard is an associate editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His writing has appeared in Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and elsewhere. Celina Pereira is a Brazilian-American graphic designer and artist based in Los Angeles.