Jeezy says Nas helped inspire him to squash his beef with Freddie Gibbs.
In an interview with Billboard, the rapper credited Nas with allowing him to move on from his issues with Gibbs, with whom he publicly reconciled earlier this year. “When I realized that most of the time people act out, you don’t have to match energy and engage or react—because, at the end of the day, especially with the Freddie shit, it was just bad communication,” he said, echoing comments Gibbs made himself in interviews promoting his new album, Soul Sold Separately.
“Same thing with [Rick] Ross—just bad communication, and it took the right people to get in the mix,” he continued. “What I have learned is the same when Nas did ‘Hip Hop Is Dead’ and I reacted. I was kinda spazzing out on the radio, if you remember. I’ll never forget when I got in the car from the radio station, somebody from Def Jam was like, ‘Nas wanna holla at you. He’s on the phone.’”
He said that when he got the call from Nas, he answered ready for a fight. In fact, he suggested they could even “race cars” or “shoot guns” to figure out their differences. “He said, ‘What’s up, King?’ He asked how I’m feeling, and he was like, ‘I can understand your frustration, but let me explain what I’m saying, and how it has nothing to do with you,’” recalled Jeezy.
“He was so calm—and I always remembered that. When me and Freddie [Gibbs] had our thing, that was one of the reasons I remained calm—because I’ve been on the other side of that,” he said. Gibbs and Jeezy had issues over how the former was handled at CTE World, the latter’s record label. Gibbs has admitted that he was the one who “made it personal,” and has taken responsibility for making the situation worse. “So I’m hearing his frustration, and I get it, because we’re doing business and not everybody’s gonna be happy,” said Jeezy. “It’s like being married, you gotta communicate. You can’t be like, ‘I’m gonna blow the whole house up.’”
He added that he believes Black men have issues with communicating, which is something he’s actively tried to work on. “It was love,” he said. “That’s it. It wasn’t even nothing to have a conversation about, because we both knew where we stood at that. So going forward, we gotta communicate better.”
