Gunna
Sergio Giavanni Kitchens grew up in College Park on the south side of metro Atlanta and took the name Gunna as he came up through the mixtape circuit, signing to Young Thug's YSL/Young Stoner Life imprint and building a following with the 'Drip Season' tapes. He turned a soft, Auto-Tuned croon and a fixation on luxury detail into commercial breakthroughs — the Lil Baby duet 'Drip Too Hard' and consecutive number-one albums 'WUNNA' and 'DS4Ever' — that helped define the plush, melodic strain of late-2010s Atlanta trap. After being jailed in the 2022 YSL racketeering case and released following a plea deal, he returned with 'a Gift & a Curse' and its breakout single 'fukumean.'
Gunna came up as a protege of Young Thug, signed to Thug's YSL/Young Stoner Life label, and his singing-rapping owes an obvious debt to Thug's elastic, melody-first approach — the way a bar bends into a warble, the playful ad-libs, the willingness to treat the voice as a rubbery instrument rather than deliver flat couplets.
listen forThrow on Thug's 'Best Friend' and notice how he slides from a rapped line into a sung, curling hook mid-phrase; then hear Gunna do the same slippery move on 'SKYBOX,' half-crooning the luxury boasts so the melody carries as much weight as the words.
The plush, Auto-Tuned croon Gunna glides across trap drums descends from the template Future built in Atlanta — melody smeared over hard 808s, drug-and-designer imagery delivered in a woozy, medicated tone rather than a hard bark. Gunna works the same seam between rapping and singing that Future opened up.
listen forCue Future's 'Codeine Crazy' for that syrupy, drifting melody sung over menacing production, then play Gunna's 'Baby Birkin' — same recipe, the voice floating a hazy tune above the beat while the lyric piles up luxury-brand detail.
The quotable, metaphor-stacked writing under Gunna's easy delivery traces back to Lil Wayne, whose punchline-dense Southern rap and Auto-Tune-era experiments made the free-associative luxury boast a genre staple. Gunna favors the same steady stream of turned-around brand names and sly wordplay tucked into the flow.
listen forListen to Wayne rattle off rapid-fire, self-contained punchlines over the skeletal loop of 'A Milli,' then hear Gunna keep a similar unbroken run of quotable, brand-dropping lines going on 'fukumean' — the appeal is the density of one-liners more than any hook.