Opinion: Jeezy’s black-tie affair at Symphony Hall was an homage to his journey

The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra recently debuted its Classically Ours concert series, which was billed as a night to celebrate Jeezy and his seminal work, 2005′s “Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101.” That album helped solidify trap music’s foundation well before it became a separate subgenre worthy of a museum.

Heralded on the ASO website as “a new era of concert series featuring the music of your favorite artists accompanied by world-class symphonic orchestras,” Classically Ours invited guests — dressed in their formal best — to expect “an evening of reimagined chart-topping music, gritty opulence, and unparalleled style that will elevate the concert to a theatrical movement.”

Credit: Raftermen

Credit: Raftermen

Pairing a beloved work like “TM101″ with the ASO filled social media timelines with nostalgia, anticipation and celebration that resulted in a sold-out experience. Generations of Atlanta luminaries attended the January show — including elected officials, business leaders, and influencers past and present.

The black-tie occasion seemed like an homage to Jeezy’s journey while revisiting the past, complete with signature spirits at the bar, a photography gallery depicting some of his early success, and jazzy mood music in the lobby, courtesy of cellist Okorie “OkCello” Johnson — all of which seemed to demonstrate the 20-year evolution of not only Jeezy, the performer and entrepreneur, but also Jay Jenkins, the man.

Credit: Raftermen

Credit: Raftermen

The warm-up music in the concert hall was reminiscent of an old-school R&B concert rather than setting the tone for one of trap music’s foundational artists, but by the time the lights came up on Jeezy’s opening video montage, set to the classic “My Way” made popular by Frank Sinatra, the intergenerational crowd of approximately 1,800 was amped up for an intimate, exuberant trip down memory lane.

Rather than fully recasting Jeezy’s music in symphonic form with multiple movements, the experience struck the middle ground of incorporating ASO players to the rear of the stage, a smaller backing band near the front of the stage, and additional audio tracks for each song where appropriate, which maintained a cohesion with the artist’s spoken lyrics and the audience’s familiarity with the music.

There’s a timelessness about Jeezy’s early catalog, accentuated by familiarity and his ability to put on a really tight performance. He has likely performed standout tracks “Standing Ovation,” “Get Ya Mind Right,” “And Then What” and “Trap or Die” hundreds of times, and the ease and fluidity displayed in navigating that material showed. Only after a brief intermission did Jeezy deviate from the “TM101″ set list to perform some of the other notable songs/moments of his storied early catalog.

For an artist 20 years into his career who released a new body of work, “SNOFALL,” less than four months ago, this Classically Ours moment would seem to infer that Jeezy might be winding down, yet he’s still making music that resonates with both sides of hip-hop’s generational divide. (Check out his feature on EST Gee’s 2022 track “The Realest.”)

It’s true that hip-hop is no longer just a young person’s game, but that doesn’t mean fans of different eras coexist without tension about the current state of the culture. For whatever it’s worth, Jeezy seems above those social-media conversations, and simply sticks to what he does best — revisiting memories about the past and sparking motivation to move beyond life’s difficult circumstances.

Yet, perhaps because the emphasis of Classically Ours is on the past, rather than the present, it says more about the public — us, Atlanta, and maybe even Atlanta Symphony Orchestra — than it does Jeezy.

Memories in the form of nostalgia are often an easy and expensive sell — ticket prices on the secondary markets for this show were above $1000 — and the black-tie attire and comfy ASO environs may have helped some forget the realities of what early trap music captured, namely urgent humanity, trauma, poverty, limited options and many lives cut short before their prime. Maybe forgetting is the point of it all; some would say that’s what Atlanta does well — remembering to forget.

Thus, for at least one January night in Atlanta, there was an air of celebratory trap-music escapism, almost as if the gritty realities of the real trap that Jeezy described in such entertaining and compelling detail were a world away — all while current headlines and timelines remind us that’s not entirely true. Jeezy is an anomaly.

Relatively few artists get to escape the trap unscathed or live long enough to have this kind of reinvention or celebratory moment. He’s a successful soul survivor with timeless motivation. If nothing else, that’s worth assembling a symphony and raising a glass in his honor.

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Floyd Hall is a media strategist, engineer, cultural producer, writer and documentarian from Atlanta. He is a 2020 Idea Capital artist grant recipient. He also is a Hambidge Creative Residency Fellow and has presented as a guest lecturer at Savannah College of Art and Design, Spelman College, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art and the Hudgens Center for Art and Learning; he is a media contributor to ArtsATL, Number, Inc, ART PAPERS and Americans for the Arts.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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