The latest in a long line of Young Jeezy mixtapes opens with the veteran MC feeling "sick and tired of the bullshit" being perpetrated by fake rappers and fake gangsters, wearily shaking his head at all the world's fuckery. It's a familiar scene to anyone who's at least tangentially familiar with Jeezy's dense discography. Cranky disappointment is one of his two default emotional settings (the other being an extreme case of Thinks He's Tony Montana Syndrome), and as the years without a hit to match the success of visceral anthems like "Go Crazy" and "My President is Black" add up, it's become the dominant mood on recent releases, as on 2011's TM103: Hustlerz Ambition.
So aside from its faux-exotic instrumentation (a vaguely old-timey-Mexican combination of flamenco-style guitar and tambourine), "El Jefe Intro" pretty much sets up It's Tha World as yet another one of the decently executed but ultimately uninspiring releases that have typified the "Larry Fishburne beard"-era of Jeezy's career. The several tracks following it only seem to confirm that suspicion-- making the synthesized bass riff underpinning track eight, "RIP", something of a surprise.
"RIP" has a lot going for it, including a beat by "Rack City" producer DJ Mustard that owes an obvious debt to 80s LA electro funk, and a guest appearance by professional song-improver 2 Chainz, but its most remarkable quality is that Jeezy is very clearly having a good time here. He dips around the bassline with a nimbleness we haven't heard from him in years, tosses off references to Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, and uses his trademark "ha-haaa" ad lib to express actual pleasure, rather than the ghoulish irony for which he usually deploys it. Suddenly it's easy to remember why you downloaded all of those less than satisfying mixtapes in the first place: because when he's fully engaged, Young Jeezy is still one of the most talented rappers working.
The combination of DJ Mustard and heavy throwback vibes seems to suit Jeezy especially well. A couple of tracks after "RIP" is another Mustard-produced slow-burner, "All the Same", where Jeezy teams up with fellow proudly grown-ass rapper E-40, who kicks off his verse paraphrasing KRS-One and spends the rest of it bemusedly recounting the ways in which younger rappers high on their own success have messed up their situations. For a while now, E-40 has been perfecting a philosophy that Jeezy seems to be coming around to: the best way for an artist now beyond their most marketable years to compete against the hot new things is to simply declare themselves out of their league, and to act and create accordingly.
Not to give the impression that Young Jeezy's shopping for a La-Z-Boy and a spot in a retirement community. While "RIP", "All the Same", the frictionless, Warren G-produced "Just Got Word", and the fantastically nasty Trey Songz-assisted sex jam "Tonight" are badass in their own not-giving-a-fuck kind of way, Jeezy also takes time out to prove that he can still be badass in the ways he's best known for. "Damn Liar" is a vicious diss track so huge and mean that, instead of aiming it at just one rival, Jeezy uses it to call out reams of rappers. And "Turn Up or Die" comes closer than maybe any other song in years to nailing the intoxicating combination of hedonism and nihilism that made the rap world fall in love with "Go Crazy" in the first place.
After a run of songs like that, it's easy to forgive Jeezy for essentially tacking two outro numbers onto the end of the tape-- one of which is called "Thank Me", about how grateful we should all be to have him around. He's obviously been very deeply into the zone, and coming down from that sometimes takes two outro songs. They're basically afterthoughts, but it's still easy for a listener to finish the mixtape in a way that Jeezy hasn't made them feel in a while: already hungry for the next one.
