DJ Drama and Jeezy—who became famous as Young Jeezy—were equally important to trap music becoming the dominant sound of hip-hop in the mid-aughts. Though trap is less of a powerhouse in 2022 than it was then, SNOFALL, a project released almost 20 years after their first pairing (2004’s Tha Streetz Iz Watchin’ mixtape), confirms that together they are as capable as they ever were of producing—to borrow a phrase common in Drama parlance—quality street music.
SNOFALL itself sounds a great deal like their earliest collaborative work. The project features the very producers who helped him define their shared era, names like D. Rich, Cool & Dre, J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, and Don Cannon. And Jeezy is as pugnacious an MC as he ever was, if slightly wizened. Here he opts less for flexing on detractors than educating the legions of younger G’s he once took so much pride in motivating to chase paper. He uses songs like “Street Cred” to instill a vision of legal hustling, warning them that “street cred” never paid any of his bills, fed his family, took him out of the country for months at a time, or helped him close a million-dollar deal. None of which is to say that the balling has slowed in any way, shape, or fashion. Look no further than “Still Havin,” “Grammy,” or “My Accountant” for an understanding that the Jeezy brand is still and will always be “rich gangsta shit.”