“She definitely got her money.” She died before she could see his current success. “She went to church every Sunday and was always the best dressed woman, but she got her money,” he said laughing. She was both a devout Christian and a sassy numbers runner. One of his biggest inspirations growing up, he said, was his grandmother, a walking contradiction.
(“She’s been clean for 10 years, so she’s still my lady,” he rhymes.) He recalls the drug addiction his mother once battled. So on tracks like “Dreamin’,” his most introspective work to date, he offers listeners a glimpse at the man behind the dark shades and gruff exterior. Reid has encouraged Jeezy to open up more. But he won’t make an effort to appeal to the masses.”īut Mr. He doesn’t want to grow leaps and bounds. “I just wanted people to hear what we in the streets are going through, hear the stories of the people locked up, the people that ain’t here no more.”Īntonio Reid, chairman of Universal’s Island Def Jam unit, the parent company of Jeezy’s label, said: “Strangely enough, for him it’s very important that he grows gradually. “I’m not trying to be the greatest rapper alive,” he said. There are no complex rhyme schemes or clever metaphors, just the facts of his life served over provocative beats and in between memorable ad libs. Jeezy would be the first to tell you that he’s not a rapper’s rapper. Breihan added, “Jeezy’s been pushing these same lines since he first emerged, and they sound emptier every time he trots them out.” He pointed to a rhyme from the album: “Heartless, I might need to see the wizard/Until then, I’ma make the snow a blizzard.” Mr. “When Jeezy resorts to standard hustler wordplay, the results are almost unbelievably lame,” Tom Breihan wrote for Pitchfork, the music Web site. One has to wonder what he is trying to inspire people to do: Be better drug dealers? No, he said, before breaking into what sounded like a late-night infomercial: “If you’re down, this album will pick you up if you’re up, it will keep you up and if your money is down, it will help get your money up.”Įarly reviews of the album have been mixed, with some critics suggesting that Jeezy’s shtick has grown old. “When you’re stuck in the ’hood, you don’t get a lot of hope, ’cause people all around you are so negative,” he said. With “Inspiration” Jeezy, who often compares himself to a motivational speaker, a kind of Tony Robbins of the ’hood, said he wants to encourage people to strive for something better. “Now everyone knows you and you don’t know everybody.” “In the streets you can be discreet,” he said. He does, however, believe that his chances of being gunned down have only increased since he’s become a celebrity. “I ain’t infatuated with anything but money,” he said. It looks like vintage Tupac-like paranoia, but Jeezy insists that he’s not preoccupied with death. (Hey, it worked for the pharaohs.)Ī short promotional film to support the album shows him narrowly escaping an attempt on his life. “Jeezy likes to drink/Jeezy likes to smoke/Jeezy likes to mix Arm & Hammer with his coke,” he rhymes on “J.E.E.Z.Y.” On “Bury Me a G,” he delivers instructions about how he would like to be laid to rest in Evisu jeans and with a $100,000 in spending money for the afterlife. His drug-dealing days again take center stage. The rapper, a self-professed “perfectionist,” said he recorded 120 songs and chose what he believed were the best 16 for the album. Now he’s back with a new album, “The Inspiration,” released yesterday, which again offers snapshots of life knee-deep in Atlanta’s mean streets. Jeezy, also known as the Snowman (a not-so-veiled reference to his days has a cocaine dealer), had listeners sporting T-shirts featuring sinister-looking Frosties.
The album sold nearly two million copies at a time when a third of that is considered impressive. “A lot of people can’t handle the truth.”Īpparently they can. “I knew I’d do well in the streets, but I didn’t think I’d do so well in the mainstream,” he said over brunch at a Midtown Manhattan hotel.
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Chock full of gritty rhymes about his life on the wrong side of the law, the album turned him into a critics’ darling and a spokesman for Any Hood, U.S.A., and the antihero of suburban fans across the county. Though the Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy appears to be as cocky as they come, he never thought he would top the Billboard charts when he released his major-label debut album, “Let’s Get it: Thug Motivation 101,” last year.