Here's something Young Jeezy said when I interviewed him last year, a couple of weeks after the release of his debut album: "I ain't a rapper; I'm a motivational speaker. I don't do shows; I do seminars. I really talk to people." That's an awfully specious claim for someone who'd just become famous for making a rap album almost entirely about selling drugs. But Jeezy pushes that Tony Robbins thing hard. That first album was called Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101; this new one is called The Inspiration. And I'm not entirely certain how to explain this, but when I hear a multitracked mob of Jeezys screaming "now I command you niggas to get money" over producer Shawty Redd's monolithic haunted-house organs on album opener "Hypnotize", I want to go ask my boss for a raise. Jeezy's self-actualization rhetoric might be blunt and artless and questionable-- especially since half the time he's talking about self-actualization through sales of addictive substances-- but it's also remarkably effective.
Jeezy's aesthetics aren't really rap aesthetics, at least not in the classic sense. He doesn't put a lot of stock in wordplay or punchlines or vividly rendered streetscapes. He never switches his flow up from the slow, guttural lurch that made him famous. He doubles his voice up so he sounds like an army, layering his vocals with swarms of drawn out ad-lib exhortations. He has a signature sound, and it comes from Shawty Redd, with whom he has an intuitive chemistry: foghorn synths, churning strings, enormous drums, everything swirling up into an epic gothic heave. All of the producers on The Inspiration adapt their styles to fit Redd's template. The J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League and Don Cannon and Anthony Dent all draw on East-Coast retro-soul sweep for their tracks, but they slow everything up into a massive, nauseous swell. Atlanta go-to bounce guy Mr. Collipark, normally way friskier, dampens his drums into a windswept stomp on "Wha You Talkin About". Most spectacularly, Timbaland builds on Jeezy's horror-movie blueprint and suffuses it with his own twittery, spacey weirdness on the dazzling "A.M.".
And consider this: "That yayo shit? That's irrelevant/ You can't hide the fact that I'm intelligent," Jeezy moans on "Hypnotize". Of course, one track later he's talking about how he's "on the block all day with the blocks all day." Jeezy has ridden tired crack-rap clichés so hard that he's willfully, literally turned himself into a cartoon character: The angry snowman glaring out from hundreds of thousands of T-shirts last summer. Plenty of rappers are lyrically pushing coke these days, and Jeezy can't compete with ultra-vivid sneer-merchants like Cam'ron and Clipse. When Jeezy resorts to standard hustler wordplay, the results are almost unbelievably lame: "Heartless, I might need to see the wizard/ Until then, I'ma make the snow a blizzard." Jeezy's been pushing these same lines since he first emerged, and they sound emptier every time he trots them out.
But throughout The Inspiration, Jeezy shows a muddled desire to transcend the clichés he helped create, to create further complexity without ever resolving it. "Dreamin'" finds him in confessional mode remembering bad deeds over pretty soul strings and nauseous synth-gurgles from the Runners: "Mom's smoking rocks, same shit I'm selling/ So who's wrong, her or me?/ She addicted to the high, I'm addicted to the cash/ Almost put my hands on her when I caught her in my stash." The story has a happy ending: "I know it's hard, but we made it, baby/ Ten years clean, so she still my lady." But even with that last line, it's still an awfully bleak story, and I have to wonder if she'd still be his lady even if she wasn't clean or whether time can really heal the wounds of the son's profession being so closely linked with the mother's disease.
On "Bury Me a G", Jeezy imagines himself murdered and manages to make it sound glamorous: "Which one of you shot me? Which one of you bastards?/ Bet my nigga King throw a hundred grand in my casket." Jeezy sounds like he's long accepted an early death as inevitability, like he's learned to live with it. In Jeezy's inspirational talk, bravura and fatalism are inextricably intertwined, and insights come almost despite themselves: "We live life on the edge like it's no tomorrow/ We grind hard like it's no today/ And do the same shit like it's yesterday/ The game never stops, so who's next to play?" There's wisdom in his ignorance and ignorance in his wisdom.
