Gunna Is Fed Up on ‘a Gift and a Curse’

The latest in pop-culture news, recaps, and reviews, plus close reads, profiles, interviews, and more from Vulture.com. [Brand Logo]( album review [Gunna Is Fed Up]( Isolation and anger hang over a Gift & a Curse, the rapper’s first album since taking a plea deal in the YSL indictment. Photo: Young Stoner Life Records / 300 Entertainment In 2022, a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, indicted Young Thug and 27 other members of his YSL collective in a 56-count RICO case. The investigation, part of a growing trend of prosecutors accusing rap groups of being criminal gangs rather than musical acts, [spans]( grave allegations of murder and armed robbery but also suggests that wearing a sweatshirt with the word SLIME on it or rapping “red just like Elmo” is “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.” In almost every instance where the video or audio of a song is shared online, it’s referred to by prosecutors as a social-media post rather than a creative work. The racial (and possibly First Amendment–violating) underpinnings of this are obvious: Black artists in historically Black art forms have their every utterance cast as literal and incriminating, stripped of poetic license and divorced from genre convention. [read more]( The Latest TV Recaps • Below Deck Sailing Yacht: [Distracted Daisy]( [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( Stories We Think You’ll Like [Hey, It’s Sara Ramírez They’ve heard your Che Diaz jokes.]( [The Subversive Self-Portraits of Iiu Susiraja “Being blank is the same as being real,” she has said.]( [Trent Reznor ‘Teared Up’ When He Heard ‘Levitating’ by Dua Lipa “When she got to the ‘sugarboo’ line, it broke me.”]( By Justin Curto [Deviant, Devious, Dork Does The Idol want us to fear Tedros Tedros or laugh at him? And why can’t the Weeknd sell either?]( [Thank Goodness, Wicked Is on the Way With new release dates and details on the GOAT.]( [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [Today’s Crossword]( 16-Down, Five Letters: Use Hulu, perhaps. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images Into It With Sam Sanders Photo-Illustration: Vulture. Photos: Mathew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman; Rick Kern/Getty Images; Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. There are pieces of culture that speak to a queer identity before we can articulate those identities for ourselves. Comedian and writer Guy Branum explained it this way: “For so many centuries, queer people have only been able to communicate with each other in large part through culture. It really is about leaving breadcrumbs so that people can find their way to the stuff that they need to find.” To hear Branum, Alex Newell, and Lena Waithe talk more about the movies that made them queer, [listen to the full episode of Into It.]( [Read more from Vulture]( A newsletter of TV and movie recommendations. [Sign up]( to get it every week. [Get the Newsletter]( [logo]( [facebook logo]( [instagram logo]( [twitter logo]( [unsubscribe]( | [privacy notice]( | [update preferences]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. Was this email forwarded to you? [Sign up now]( to get this newsletter in your inbox. [View this email in your browser.]( You received this email because you have a subscription to New York. Reach the right online audience with us For advertising information on email newsletters, please contact AdOps@nymag.com Vox Media, LLC 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, 12th Floor Washington, DC 20036 Copyright © 2023, All rights reserved