In the debut episode of Boardroom’s new music series, ATL’s Trapper of the Year breaks down how he cooked up his classic album.
It may be hard to fathom now, with his consecutive platinum albums and myriad hit records, but Jeezy‘s career wasn’t always a sure thing. He was on the cutting edge of a new style of music that most people thought, at best, would be a fly-by-night trend. Outside of Atlanta, the newly christened sub-genre of trap music was just starting to catch fire.
Sure, rappers had devoted themselves to detailing their past street exploits on wax, but they did so from a vantage point far removed from the blocks they hustled on. They spit rhymes as kingpins; made men. The guys coming out of Atlanta flipped the script and made music about the struggles and hardships that came from a life on the corner. It wasn’t all glitz and glamour; it was also a lot of grams and gunplay. And no one did the former better than Jay Jenkins.
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His debut album, Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101, was a maximalist version of the mixtapes he dropped a few years prior. Full of 808s that could crack a manhole cover in two and clever couplets that made you chuckle and screw your face up, Jeezy and his mix of up-and-coming and legendary producers delivered a classic that featured songs for damn near every type of listener and situation. There were the street records, the deep records, and the club records.
The trick that Jeezy pulled, however, was making it so you never quite knew which song was really supposed to be which. The radio smash “Soul Survivor” is just as much a street record as a club record. “Standing Ovation” is deep and inspiring, but could also ring off at Magic City. The real surprise, though, came at Track 6.
“Go Crazy,” the album’s third single, was produced by a newcomer from Philly named DJ Don Cannon. Up until that point, the popular party DJ had only produced for artists who worked directly with him and his partner, DJ Drama. He made the beat for another rising Atlanta superstar but managed to get it to Jeezy in time to make the Def Jam debut. Unlike most other beats on the TM 101, “Go Crazy” is built around a warm soul sample — The Impressions’ “(Man, Oh Man) I Want To Go Back” — and rolling drum line. No stuttering hi-hats. No sinister synths. It sounded like a beat a New York rapper would hop on.
And that’s exactly what happened. Jay-Z, enjoying his retirement from rap and spending his days as the president of Def Jam, decided to flex a little and prove he still knew how to put a 16 (or, in this case, a 64) together. The result turned out to be one of Jeezy’s most classic records.
For the first episode of Boardroom’s On Record, a series in which we speak to artists and learn exactly how they made and released their most classic songs and albums, we speak to Jeezy before the 20th anniversary of his debut LP and learn how much he had to spend to make it a reality, how he marketed himself and the project, and how he overcame a major setback before the album event hit shelves.
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