As for Jeezy's voice, it takes up a whole lot less space, leaving room for his less distinctive friends. And the production mostly comes from relatively anonymous and untested unknowns, all doing their best to approximate Shawty Redd's titanic lurch and only occasionally succeeding. When Jeezy is alongside compatriots Slick Pulla and Bloodraw, he loses his emotional strive, instead bullshitting about the day-to-day minutia of drug-dealing. But Cold Summer, the new album from Jeezy's group USDA, mostly does away with the sweeping production and the success-above-all exhortations.
Without them, he'd be nothing, and that's why you never hear him on tracks that don't match his singular aesthetic. When those three pillars come together right, Jeezy sounds enormous. Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101 and The Inspiration both shifted more than a million copies in a period when albums aren't selling well at all, and they did it on the strength of the triumphantly larger-than-life persona that Jeezy's created for himself. Those three selling-points don't look like much on paper, but they were enough to make for two compulsively listenable albums. Instead, his appeal rests on three pillars: his overdriven Tony Robbins motivational-speaker rhetoric, his usually-multitracked slow-motion groan, and the churning, monolithic doom-rap production style pioneered by frequent collaborator Shawty Redd. Young Jeezy isn't much of a rapper, at least as far as that term is traditionally understood.