No one ever thought about Young Jeezy as an inherently political artist. If you’ve ever heard Thug Motivation 101, you would think it’s Jeezy’s take on Scarface through George Bush-era excess. His focus was on making it out via trapping, not the socioeconomic state of America and no one was expecting otherwise. However, in 2008, the U.S. was in disarray. A brutal recession that radically altered the housing market, the financial disparity higher than ever, and the country at war in the Middle East in the pursuit of oil. Sound familiar?
The difference is, Jeezy was around to make a statement. Insert The Recession, which came out September 2, 2008, 2 months prior to President Barack Obama winning the presidency. He even made “My President”, a declaration that the election was already set in stone. But what was with this political shift from the Atlanta rapper?
In an interview with Metrowest Daily News, he reflected on the making of his 3rd album and how all he could pay attention to were the atrocities outside. Eventually, it reached a point where Jeezy’s intentions were to make something everyone living in America could grasp.
Jeezy Takes on the State of the World in 2008 on ‘The Recession’
“I think I came up with the name ‘The Recession’ like midstream into the album because when I looked up at the songs I had, like ‘My President’ and ‘Crazy World’. I was like, ‘Maybe I’m paying too much attention to what’s going on’, and I didn’t want my music to come out in a depressive [or] negative way. So I looked at what I had and I was like, ‘The rest of the songs that I am going to do are going to be those ‘We Shall Overcome’ anthems that were always made but were more street,’” Jeezy explained. “But now I want to make them for everybody. You don’t even just have to be from the streets to know where I am coming from. Even though that’s what the music is intended for, I want to put it into terms where everyone can get it.”
So what was the primary message Jeezy was trying to convey to his audience? Ultimately, it was all in the name of solidarity. “We as people, we have to stand. Get together as far as voting, we have to get together as far as our communities… our culture. We all know we’re in a recession, how are we going to deal with it? We’re going to deal with it the same way when the Vietnam War was going on: with good music. We’re going to party our way through it; we cannot sit here and cry about it.”
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