7. YOUNG JEEZY - Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101
Def Jam, 2005
This record starts out spooky as all hell. Ominous synths bounce around the track for several tension-laden moments while a faint "'Eyyyyyy" repeats itself every few seconds, like some ghosty whispering in your sleeping ear but then UH-OH here's the beat! Jeezy busts down the door with a killer opening couplet ("I used to hit the kitchen lights/Cockroaches everywhere/Hit the kitchen lights/Now it's marble floors everywhere") and it's all over, you're dead now and you're a ghost too, time to go a-hauntin'! Some have expressed ire over Jeezy's seemingly compulsive tendency to rhyme words with themselves, but more oft than not it makes for some truly great wordplay - the type of which might look silly on paper but, delivered in Jay Jenkins' larger-than-death growl makes for a kinetic, goose-pimply experience. The credit for this album's greatness (and yes, it is a great album, save for a couple bummers like the radio-pandering, Akon-produced "Soul Survivor"), as with most good hip-hop records, belongs as much to its producers as to its star; in this case, Shawty Redd provides the beats for 7 of the 19 tracks heard here, and his eerie zombie synths and booming low end prove an unspeakably perfect pairing for Jeezy's end-of-days coke-rap posturing (take a listen to "Hypnotize," the terrifying, narcotized opening track from Jeezy's next album, to hear perhaps the greatest-ever teaming of these two). It's a party record, sure, and Thug Motivation 101 sounds fantastic bumping out of a pair of subs, but it's also a character study, a chronicle of one of rap's most larger-than-life figures ("Donald Trump in a white tee/And white Ones") and his joys and struggles, both fulsome and all too real.
STREAM: Young Jeezy - "Standing Ovation"
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