Like most of America, rapper Young Jeezy watched the latest Republican presidential debate with much concern and scrutiny. The emergence of Donald Trump as a front-runner, the ongoing issues surrounding crime, foreign policy and racism are weighing heavily on the collective conscious of the public; and coming away from the debates, most seem to have more questions than answers. This particular debate was another showcase for the incorrigible Trump and more contentious barbs between the candidates. For Jeezy, there wasn’t a whole lot of clarity being offered in this latest Republican slugfest.
“I definitely thought there was a lot of ‘me’ and ‘I’ and braggadocios things regarding what people have accomplished and how well they run businesses,” he observed. “It was really a bragging match — not a lot of solutions.”
The Republican debates most notably ignored Black Lives Matter this time around — and the ongoing issue of police brutality and murder against Black citizens. This was something that especially troubled Jeezy.
“They didn’t really tackle a lot of race issues, and I thought that was weak,” he says. “For them to even bring the War on Drugs up—you have all of these people in prison for marijuana and now you want to legalize it in certain places. That’s a business move, man. You broke up families of people who were just trying to make some type of living, and now you get up there and say you want to legalize it to help the economy. It confuses people. My thing with people like Trump is, if they talk like that on a panel, on live TV–imagine what the conversations are like behind closed doors.”
One particular debater made a more positive impression. Jeezy believes that Carly Fiorina made a good point regarding the inability to see all that is wrong with the system.
“She said, ‘When you’ve been in the system for so long, you don’t even know the system is corrupt,’ ” Jeezy recalls. “But our government does fail us at times — a lot of times. When you’re out trying to make ends meet, you don’t pay attention to those things. But you notice when these debates come, you hear about all of these problems that you haven’t heard about in four to eight years. And things just get worse.”
Jeezy has blasted Trump for his characterizations of Latino immigrants as “rapists” and “criminals”; the hip-hop star questions why removing those immigrants who are undocumented is being treated with such urgency. “They want to go and evacuate all of these people out of America because they’re illegals, but they’re already here. Why don’t you spend that money to better the people?”
In addressing the Republican debates, Jeezy isn’t trying to become the next Chuck D, but he is making social awareness a bigger priority in his music and being as vocal as he can about current events.
“I wanted to take a bigger [stance on] social responsibility and educate people as much as I can on things that I happen to know,” he explains. “I’m not going to tell you that I’m going to be on the straight and narrow but now we have to know what’s going on in our world. If we don’t know, our kids won’t know.”
