He feared time was running out, so he needed to get with the right person. At the time, Jeezy was waking up with cold sweats and watched as his childhood friends went to jail before TM 101 even dropped. Probably because they didn’t feel his urgency. He schemed to make a mixtape-despite not knowing what that meant-but collaborators like Jazze Pha and Trick Daddy advised against it. To avoid the dreaded stigma of being a “get money cat that’s a wack rapper,” Jeezy had to get hot in the only market he cared about: the streets of Atlanta. Over the years, he developed his signature sound with Shawty by convincing him to slow down his beats and make them triumphant but gothic. He would start coming up with the song before I could even put the melody down.” I made every beat custom for him, and he’d be like, ‘I like that, keep playing that.’ He would immediately start rapping, not writing. “I used to tell him to stop writing and just say what you feel,” says Shawty Redd, who produced seven of the 19 songs on TM 101. He released two independent albums as Lil J, 2001’s Thuggin' Under the Influence (T.U.I.) and 2003’s Come Shop Wit Me. Untrained in the recording process, he delivered choppy verses and threw in ad-libs to fill up the space. He was still a work in progress even Shawty and DJ Drama felt he sounded too much like Trick Daddy.
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After befriending then-17-year-old rapper/producer Shawty Redd in a strip club, he spent long nights in the studio with Shawty learning how to make records. What he lacked in technical know-how, he made up for with work ethic. When his artists got locked up, he started rapping under the moniker Lil J. Still in his early 20s, he tried making his CEO dreams a reality by recruiting local rappers to his label, Corporate Thugz Entertainment.
He did, however, fall in love with rap at an early age and fondly recalls putting his ear to the walls in his apartment to overhear his neighbor playing JJ Fad’s “Supersonic.” He also discovered he had a knack for “putting them words together” when he was too shy to talk to girls in school he would write them love notes to win their affection.
Jeezy was a reluctant star, one who initially aspired to be behind the scenes.
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“I consider Thug Motivation to be the Get Rich or Die Tryin’ of the South,” says DJ Drama, whose iconic Gangsta Grillz mixtape series was only kicking off in the early 2000s when Coach K introduced him to Jeezy. In an era when A-Town stalwarts like Ludacris, OutKast, and Lil Jon were running commercial rap radio, Jeezy (much like fellow trapstar T.I.) used his mixtape grind to turn himself into a local rap sensation before using TM 101 to launch himself into national stardom. The album ushered in the golden age of Atlanta rap, and its effects are still being felt today. When coke rap classic TM 101 dropped on July 26, 2005, Young Jeezy lived up to the self-proclaimed title of being both your “favorite rapper’s favorite rapper” and your “favorite trapper’s favorite trapper.” As the last hurrahs of G-Unit/Dipset/Roc-A-Fella came and went in the mid-2000s, the epicenter of hip-hop shifted from New York to Atlanta.
That would make me just like every other rapper.” I can’t talk to these people about Thug Motivation when we have fake money in the boxes. “I was like, ‘Go out to my trunk and get the rest,’” says the 37-year-old Jeezy, sitting in his Malibu mansion that overlooks the beach. Twenty minutes later, his people pulled up with four duffel bags and started pouring out $1.8 million in bills-$200,000 short of the $2 million required to fill up all the boxes. With nearly $2 million in fake cash on hand for the shoot, Def Jam’s art team wondered how in the world they were supposed to get that much real cash to replace it. Jeezy realized the money on set wasn’t real, and to him, that meant the entire shoot was illegitimate. The setup was simple enough: Jeezy sitting in front of boxes of money stacked up like Legos. The cover shoot for Young Jeezy’s major label debut album, Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101, did not go as planned.