But what do we know about Young Jeezy? He belongs in the handful of today’s unavoidably popular rappers. As a featured guest on other albums, he’s nearly as prolific as his peers Lil Wayne and Jay-Z. His distinctive timbre can be perceived as a unique element of his persona or as a marketable sonic gimmick. On previous albums, his artistic aims have been fairly explicit: to inspire his audience to pursue decadent levels of wealth and to reflect upon his own by-any-means-necessary road to realizing that goal. If the pseudo-motivational-speaker schtick seems corny, that’s because it often was. Nonetheless, Jeezy was redeemed frequently by exceptional production and occasionally by crafting genuinely interesting raps.

Jeezy has been amongst rap’s most heavily criticized artists, though it’s been fairly accepted that he has an ear for beats whose scale is hypnotically titanic. His two previous albums, Thug Motivation 101: Let’s Get It and The Inspiration, were maximalist skyscrapers of sound, busy yet harmonious amalgamations of conventional and unconventional noises. The Recession continues this trend, again achieving a certain orchestral grandiosity. Though the album’s style remains somewhat static in this regard, a healthy variety is realized by songs like the mock-go-go of “Circulate,” the paranoid 808s of “Don’t You Know” and the anthemic “My President is Black.” Sci-fi synthesizers, on the other hand, pierce a horror film melody on “Hustlaz Ambition.” The instrumentals are consistently faithful to Jeezy’s lyrics and delivery, with nothing seeming awkwardly mismatched, if one is concerned with that sort of thing.