Young Jeezy The Inspiration Full Album

[Trisha Quercioli]

Heres 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 clichs 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 clichs 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.

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The Miami Gardens native has cascaded through boom-bap, synth-soaked trap metal, and cloud rap throughout his catalog. But on his upcoming project, King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2, Curry returns to the muddied, subwoofer-thudding soundscape that he captured on the first installment back in 2012.

Reignited by the same musical heroes that led to Vol. 1, Curry is comfortable in old sonic form. Vol. 2's lead singles "Hot One" (feat. A$AP Ferg and TiaCorine) and "Black Flag Freestyle" with That Mexican OT fully capture the sharp-edged sound that stretched from Port Arthur, Texas to the Carolinas.

A string of bouncy, syrup-pouring, and playalistic Southern trap songs led him back to familiar grounds. The new 15-song capsule features Juicy J, 2 Chainz, Project Pat, That Mexican OT, Maxo Kream, and others inspired by the same pioneers that fall below the Mason-Dixon line.

GRAMMY.com sat down with Curry before the release of King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2 on July 19. The "Ultimate" rapper revealed his "Big Ultra" persona, his ability to crank out hits from his bedroom, and his recent discoveries being "outside."

All my projects are critically acclaimed. The main thing is staying good at what I do. That comes with a lot of effort, a lot of studying, and a lot of work. I take pride in my job and I have fun making music.

"It's always time to evolve and grow as an artist, so I'm not rushing to jump into another sound or rushing to do something different," Ice Spice told Apple Music of her tried-and-true musical style.

Riot produced every track on Like.. ? as well as "Barbie World," her GRAMMY-nominated Barbie soundtrack hit with Nicki Minaj. Their musical chemistry continues to shine on Y2K!, as Riot had a hand in each of the LP's 10 tracks.

Named after Ice Spice's birthdate (January 1, 2000), her debut album celebrates all things Y2K, along with the music and colorful aesthetics that defined the exciting era. To drive home the album's throwback theme, Ice tapped iconic photographer David LaChapelle for the cover artwork, which features the emcee posing outside a graffiti-ridden subway station entrance. LaChapelle's vibrant, kitschy photoshoots of Mariah Carey, Lil' Kim, Britney Spears, and the Queen of Y2K Paris Hilton became synonymous with the turn of the millennium.

True to form, Y2K!'s penultimate song and second single "Gimmie a Light" borrows from Sean Paul's "Gimme the Light," which was virtually inescapable in 2002. "We really wanted to have a very authentic Y2K sample in there," Ice Spice said in a recent Apple Music Radio interview with Zane Lowe. Not only does the Sean Paul sample bring the nostalgia, but it displays Ice's willingness to adopt new sounds like dancehall on an otherwise drill-heavy LP.

In album opener "Phat Butt," Ice boasts about rocking Dolce & Gabbana, popping champagne, and being a four-time GRAMMY nominee: "Never lucky, I been blessed/ Queen said I'm the princess/ Been gettin' them big checks in a big house/ Havin' rich sex," she asserts.

Between trekking across the globe for her first headlining tour and lighting up the Empire State Building orange as part of her Y2K! album rollout, Ice Spice shows no signs of slowing down. And as "BB Belt" alludes, her deal with 10K Projects/Capitol Records (she owns her masters and publishing) is further proof that she's the one calling the shots in her career.

Whatever Ice decides to do next, Y2K! stands as a victory lap; it shows her prowess as drill's latest superstar, but also proves she has the confidence to tackle new sounds. As she rapped in 2023's "Bikini Bottom," "How can I lose if I'm already chose?" Judging by her debut album, Ice Spice is determined to keep living that mantra.

Every album comes with a backstory, but not many come with two. Rakim's new project G.O.D's Network (REB7RTH), out July 26, came together in a few quick months, from signing a deal in February 2024 to completion in June. The process was spurred by one dedicated A&R person frantically combing through his network of rappers to get guest verses over beats produced by the God MC himself.

"I've known [Rakim's longtime manager] Matt [Kemp] and Rakim since 2007," Markoff tells me when I get him on the phone in late June. "They're used to getting calls from me a couple of times a year just for, like, show referrals, verse referrals, things of that nature."

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, Markoff had been talking to the folks at Fat Beats, the venerable record store-turned-distributor that's a huge name in independent hip-hop. He mentioned Rakim's name to the company, and Fat Beats responded that they'd love a project from the God MC. The original pitch, Markoff remembers, was "a three or four song EP with some remixes."

Rakim quoted his price, Fat Beats agreed, and the project was underway, with the emcee meeting with producers to look for beats. But Rakim, who hasn't released a solo album since 2009's The Seventh Seal, is not one to be hurried.

"Ra was having [DJ] Premier and Pete Rock and Ninth Wonder and some of these people come to the studio," Markoff says. "Because of scheduling conflicts and stuff and, you know, normal course of life, it just wasn't right. The vibe wasn't there."

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