2 Chainz New Autobiography? It’s a Vibe

Reading 2 Chainz’s memoir, The Voice in My Head Is God, feels a lot like sitting across from 2 Chainz in a strip club as he tells his life story while taking a random sequence of uppers and downers. It is a patchwork book with an absence of structure which, despite all odds, I greatly enjoyed reading. It is, in the end, an enlightening work about 2 Chainz’s psyche and provides a fascinating look at the famous rapper’s mind.

The Voice in My Head Is God
By 2 Chainz with Derrick Harriell
Atria/Black Privilege Publishing; 224 pages

The Voice in My Head Is God has a floating timeline, jumping between several incidents, consisting of various disconnected episodes and memories from 2 Chainz’s 48 years of life. The sole unifying theme across the book is the eponymous voice in 2 Chainz’s head, which he consistently identifies as “something” and is the thing that encourages him to make good decisions: Something told him to hide his money before nearly getting robbed at gunpoint; something told him to make a business deal with a woman he had just met; something told him to go to a recording studio at a certain time.

2 Chainz’s personal philosophy — that this something is God — forms not only the title and but the overarching theme of the book. Throughout the narrative, 2 Chainz credits this something with being responsible for his successful drug dealing career, his successful rap career, and his successful business career. 2 Chainz credits a series of coincidences and fortuitous events to this something, even in scenarios where it would have been better if that something had prevented him from getting into the scenario to begin with — such as being robbed at gunpoint by a pair of assailants on a San Francisco street in 2013 or getting shot at by a would-be assassin outside a club right before an important meeting with Sean “Diddy” Combs.

2 Chainz commits the error which memoirists have committed from St. Ignatius of Loyola onward: He assumes the reader is familiar with him and his work, and omits various crucial details such as his claim to fame, his rise to stardom, and some of his most noteworthy feats. The book is rife with intriguing anecdotes, some of which actually go somewhere. His close shave with a robber in college ends with him getting ready to take revenge, an episode the book never follows up. Meanwhile, his leg injuries sustained during an ATV mishap at a party receive some payoff as the backstory for his iconic wheelchair appearance on his Pretty Girls Like Trap Music tour.

Overall, 2 Chainz spends little time dissecting the traumas of his past, such as the revolving prison door his father went through while 2 Chainz was growing up, his ties to the drug underworld of Atlanta, or the loss of his grandparents. His relationship with his family does play a central role in the book, however it pops in and out of the story as 2 Chainz’s thoughts meander.

However much work the ghostwriter Derrick Harriell has out into the book, it still appears authentically rough and unstructured. This works insofar as it preserves 2 Chainz’s style of speaking, and retains his use of AAVE, yet on a structural level, it leaves the memoir without an overarching story. Even nonfiction requires a story to be engaging, and the only thing tying everything together is 2 Chainz’s something.

Sometimes, though, something is not enough — whether or not it’s proof of faith, psychosis, or divine intervention. While longtime fans might come away from The Voice in My Head Is God with a deeper understanding of their icon, folks new to the rapper’s world will walk away wondering what the point of the book was.