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.
