Eventually every rapper hits the point where they stop keeping up with the trends, either because they’ve lost interest in them or they’ve been left behind by them. It’s hard to tell which is the case for Jeezy. Perhaps he felt burned by the commercial failure of last year’s hitless Church in These Streets, a kinda-sorta attempt to engage with the modernist sounds of new Atlanta, or perhaps his heart was never in it, but on Trap or Die 3 Jeezy stops pretending to give even the slightest damn what listeners under 25 might be into. An album in title but mixtape in spirit, it’s a back-to-basics statement from a rapper who, even at his most commercial, never really strayed all that far from the basics to begin with.
“Let’s take these bitches back to ’05,” Jeezy rapped on “Way Too Gone,” from 2011’s TM 103: Hustlerz Ambition. That was three albums and five years ago, so it’s not like he’s ever been one to put the past behind him. It used to be that all that distinguished a Jeezy album from a mixtape was the potential that from time to time you might hear his authoritative groan over something other than the same default synth presets and trap snares, but with a tracklist dominated by Jeezy’s old-guard producers Shawty Redd and D. Rich, Trap or Die 3 promises from the outset that won’t happen. Amid the barrage of battle-cry adlibs and synthesized clatter, opener “In the Air” ends with a rant about “this watered-down shit I keep hearing on radio,” affirming the old truism that rappers only complain about the radio when they aren’t on it.
So Trap or Die 3 casts Jeezy as a true defender of trap, a music style that isn’t remotely endangered, in his own way every bit as evangelical about the craft as Jurassic 5 used to be about conscious hip-hop. A less charitable read is that he’s just trying to take an easy W after a couple of under-performing projects. That’s not the worst strategy at this stage in Jeezy’s career—by playing it so safe, the project often can’t help but hit its mark. “So What” moves with the ruthless efficiency of a slasher movie score, and “Goldmine” is similarly pared down to just the essentials: taut pianos, a few stray string stabs, and a ruthless snap of a beat. Jeezy seems reinvigorated by the familiar terrain. “Run a Fortune 500 from a pre-paid,” he boasts on the trim Yo Gotti feature “Where It at.” “Like That” nonchalantly lands the album’s most random punchline: “Have a threesome with the money: just me, you and Oprah.” And on the kinetic “Let Em Know,” the old T. Rex moves with velociraptor dexterity, matching a twitchy club tempo with a springy, hooky flow. There’s always a thrill in hearing that colossal voice move with that kind of speed; it's like witnessing somebody dunk an anvil.
Trap or Die 3 offers real reminders of Jeezy’s greatness, then, something Church in These Streets couldn’t claim. But some of these songs just sound terrible. “It Is What It Is” suffocates under a trash heap of gaudy, circa-2006 modulated horn noises, and its drum machines hit with all the tact of firecrackers going off in a tin can. “Recipe” continues Jeezy’s trend of inheriting the dullest beats Mike WiLL Made-It will sign his name to. And though courtship has never been Jeezy’s most fruitful muse, “Sexé” finds him putting even less effort into his come-ons than usual (“Bitch you know you sexy with your sexy ass…girl you know you flexing with your flexing ass.”) That track also features the record’s most flabbergasting inclusion, a partially inaudible verse from Plies that, to judge from its helpless mastering, he apparently recorded into an iPhone 4 from a bathroom stall.
How does something like that even make it onto a major-label album? Def Jam couldn’t have shelled out a few bucks to have a Plies verse re-recorded? It’s clear that in the streaming age labels have begun rubber-stamping releases that they previously would have intervened with, figuring there’s little to lose if the budget’s low enough. That’s good news for rappers who used to struggle just to get an album released. But for all the flak that label A&R teams get, at their best they incentivize innovation, pushing rappers to become something greater than themselves and providing them the resources to make it happen. Jeezy is nearing 40, and the window to promote him not just as a trap star but an actual star is closing. Nobody’s giving him that push anymore.
