It’s the same album in almost every regard, spiritually and (mostly) in quality, but on this different stage it fares surprisingly worse. What The Inspiration does that is interesting and inadvertent is remove certain outside factors in Let’s Get It‘s success - the timing, the novelty, and the t-shirt phenomenon’s momentum - and present a basically identical album in another context: 2006, the height of the Rick Ross and company coke rap trend, and every big name rapper ever is dropping a new album. This is even before we account for his hugely successful snowman t-shirts. Add to this his ridiculous timing, right at the start of today’s coke rap renaissance, and his tendency to punchline almost non-stop, and Jeezy’s success is no accident. He then proceeded to ride through the door instead with some of the best beats of the year on his record, beats like the frenetically dark synth bounce of “Bottom of the Map” and the sublimely off-kilter horn fanfare of “Go Crazy”. With most everyone not giving a shit, Jeezy now had an open door to walk through. Most Americans buying music know crack dealing is wrong, but most Americans buying music have never been affected by crack dealing on any visceral or personal sort of level, and so most Americans buying music will either be A) “nigga”-dropping suburban teens, mostly Caucasian, who think this is pretty fucking cool (“badass! badass!”), B) white hip-hop critics who feel accepting and pat themselves on the back for unconditionally praising trap rap because it makes them feel like they can see the poetry in everything! everything! so they’re not racist and definitely not just buying into what Little Brother calls the modern-day minstrel show, or C) the broadest group, people who say “ehh, crack dealing, bad, ehh,” and then think of it like they think of the kids glueing together their Nikes for pennies a day (namely, not really at all). The beauty of Jeezy’s business plan lay in the fact that he could make most everyone not give a shit. How can Jeezy portray crack-slinging as a badass shot in the face of standard capitalist successes when really it does nothing but bring capitalist stratification even further into poor neighborhoods? This, naturally, brings a whole host of issues with it. You hear this on The Inspiration‘s first track - “now I command you niggas to get money!” - a selectively-blind Billy Graham of the ghetto preaching empowerment to the disenfranchised people of the hood while ignoring the fact that it comes through the further disenfranchisement of those people in the hood that financially support them. He played his part pitch-perfectly, walking the line between the roles of the embittered crack dealer still slinging with death in his eyes and the motivational voice of the streets. With last year’s Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101, Jeezy proved himself one hell of a businessman. At the same time, he is a master of delivery, groaning his coke-rap tropes in a charismatic and powerfully layered rasp with a practiced blend of bravado and weariness, bullshit and posturing idiosyncrasy. Young Jeezy is a terrible MC but a solid rapper - weak as he is in the basic mechanics of MCing, his lyricism, flow, wordplay and meter leave much to be desired.
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