Jeezy - Church in These Streets

Pitchfork 60

Jeezy does not traffic in nuance. He dropped the ‘Young’ out of his name when he realized he wasn't young. The hooks to his biggest songs are so blunt they skirt deadpan humor—"my president is black, my Lambo is blue" works in a shockingly efficient manner, a mission statement that unpacked a hell of a lot at the right time in history in just two lines. He’s envisioned himself (on album covers at least) as a mafia don, Malcolm X, a patriot draped in the flag. His trademark grimacing snowman logo is as identifiable as a corporate brand.

Fresh off the release of last year’s Seen It All: The Autobiography, he's releasing Church in These Streets, and they are both as literal as their album titles. In his latest venture, Jeezy is a preacher, the wise, older veteran of an Atlanta rap scene that is currently worlds away from his grim motivational seminars. Church in These Streets doesn’t completely deliver on its compelling premise—a "reborn" Jeezy, half-conscious but still the self-proclaimed "God in these streets." There are some moments that strike this note, especially the spoken-word interludes that broadly touch on social issues like privatized prisons, police brutality, and even the toll of drug dealing on the lives of the hustlers and the buyers (especially striking on a record with a song called "Hustlaz Holiday"). But they do just feel like moments, a snapshot of a project Jeezy is unable to make.

After a few years of toiling in major-label purgatory, Jeezy’s new persona (and it is a "persona," not a guiding aesthetic principle) is good for a few effective, if perhaps obvious, metaphors and symbols. The song titles, just like the album title, give it all away: "Lost Souls", "Holy Water", "God", "Forgive Me". He deserves credit for turning a new album around in just a year that’s influenced by his feelings and thoughts on the current political climate, but it feels workmanlike and too deliberate to hold weight. It is conspicuously light on guests, probably by design, but Jeezy’s voice can wear during sustained listens, and when Janelle Monáe shows up on the light, totally un-Jeezy-like single "Sweet Life", she’s anonymous.

The vibe of the music seems to suggest that Jeezy wants to bring the dank and spacey stuff that Young Thug and Future work with into his playground, but grounded in his declarative, raspy voice. It's minimal, exciting stuff, the kind of creative pivot he executed so well just a few years ago overseeing CTE. "Gold Bottles" has a weak hook but features typically baroque production from London on da Track. "God" works that same apocalyptic tone of so many 808 Mafia productions: It’s a good song until you realize it’s essentially a redux of Future’s "Sh!t" from a few years ago.

"Just Win" is another highlight, riding a mournful horn sample that recalls socially aware blaxploitation movies and their rich scores, specifically Willie Hutch and the soundtrack for The Mack. It also samples Les Brown, a motivational speaker, and the song's dynamic nails the highs and the lows of this record—it clearly wants to be a meaningful, contemplative record, but it mostly reduces his action-hero slogans to blander political ones. The best Jeezy music often exploited how far he could go with memorable ad libs and punchlines, a triumphant kind of simplicity. Here that gets muted to muddied results.