This month the artist formerly known as Young Jeezy released his 9th and purportedly final solo album, TM104: The Legend of the Snowman. And while debuting at #4 on the charts is pretty good for someone who's fallen pretty far from prominence, who's only had one minor radio hit out of his last 4 albums, it's still a far cry from topping the charts several times. I'm always skeptical when a rapper announces their retirement, especially someone as relatively young as Jeezy who doesn't have any high profile career outside of music. But if this the end, I wanted to take a look back at a catalog that I think is a little better than it gets credit for.

Jeezy deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Get Ya Mind Right
2. Trap Or Die f/ Bun B
3. Bottom Of The Map
4. Bang f/ T.I. and Lil Scrappy
5. J.E.E.Z.Y.
6. Bury Me A G
7. Hypnotize (Intro)
8. Welcome Back
9. Circulate
10. Wordplay
11. Get Allot
12. Nothing
13. Everythang
14. Beez Like f/ Boosie Badazz
15. No Tears f/ Future
16. J Bo
17. Bout That f/ Lil Wayne
18. G-Wagon
19. American Dream f/ J Cole and Kendrick Lamar
20. Mr. Pyrex

Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101 (2005)
Tracks 5, 6 and 7 from The Inspiration (2006)
Tracks 8, 9, 10 and 11 from the The Recession (2008)
Tracks 12 and 13 and  from TM:103 Hustlerz Ambtion (2011)
Tracks 14 and 15 from the Seen It All: The Autobiography (2014)
Track 16 from Church In These Streets (2015)
Tracks 17 and 18 from Trap Or Die 3 (2016)
Track 19 from Pressure (2017)
Track 20 from TM104: The Legend of the Snowman (2019)

I thought about trying to cover Jeezy's mixtape work in addition to the albums. But the only mixtapes that are available in full on streaming services are some of the mediocre ones circa 2006, and I was still able to kick the playlist off with a couple of Trap Or Die highlights that were reprised on Jeezy's proper debut album. And it's kind of fitting to stick to Jeezy's 9 Def Jam albums, since he's one of the few southern rappers of his generation who used mixtapes as a springboard to his major label career but then did most of his best work on his albums.

Predictably, Shawty Redd productions make up about 1/3rd of this playlist, most of Jeezy's radio singles were by big A-list producers but his albums were always filled out by great tracks by Shawty Redd (and later, Lil Lodi and D. Rich), with J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League and Don Cannon making essential contributions. The Recession has long been my favorite Jeezy album, in part because it stood out as so confident in Jeezy's core sound while his closest contemporaries were going all over the place with albums like Paper Trail and Tha Carter III.

It's hard not to look at Jeezy's career through the lens of his rivalry with Gucci Mane, and the way Jeezy ended up with all the industry backing back in 2005 and came out of the gate with a blockbuster album and then slowly declined in sales, while Gucci kind of built up cult hero status before being more widely celebrated in the last couple years. Those two very different trajectories make Jeezy seem like the inferior artist of the two of them, and while he's a less skilled rapper and has been less influential in the long run, they still make up the big 3 of Atlanta trap alongside T.I. And Jeezy has really had a huge impact, just in terms of how he was able to use things like memorable ad libs to turn a pretty dark and ominous aesthetic into the basis for a really commercially successful career, crossing over without really making really crossover-friendly music, becoming the Atlanta guy that every A-list east coast rapper could do songs with.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 03, 2019 at 4:43 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.