Gucci Mane releases 'Trap House' — debut LP

Why it matters

Trap House came out May 24, 2005, on Big Cat Records. Radric Davis, who recorded as Gucci Mane, was 25, a recent transplant to East Atlanta from Bessemer, Alabama, and had been hustling his own mixtapes and street singles for the previous few years. The album is his official label debut. The most consequential thing about Trap House is the title. Before this album, "trap house" was vernacular for a specific kind of drug-dealing location in Black Southern neighborhoods. After Gucci's album, and after the production aesthetic that he and producers like Zaytoven and Drumma Boy developed across the rest of the 2000s, "trap" became the name of the entire sub-genre. The lead single "Icy" featured a then-rising Young Jeezy and became a regional Atlanta hit. The Jeezy-vs-Gucci beef that followed (a 2005 shootout outside an Atlanta club, a member of Jeezy's entourage killed, Gucci charged with murder and eventually cleared on self-defense grounds) is part of the album's surrounding lore. The mixtape catalog Gucci built over the next decade is one of the most prolific in rap. The whole 2010s trap economy is downstream of this album. You can hear the start on Trap House.