Jeezy stayed remarkably calm during his Verzuz battle with Gucci Mane, even when he was dropping diss records aimed at the Snowman.
Now, in a new interview with Big Boy, Jeezy reveals how he was able to remain poised during the battle. “I just felt like I wasn’t gonna lose my cool—I wasn’t gonna let anyone, including myself, drag me back 20 years,” he said around the 22:00 mark. “I worked so hard to get in a place where things are good for me. I got multiple things going on, I employ a lot of people, and everybody depend on me. Matter of fact, I got a daughter that I love very much. I gotta make it back home to her.”
He continued, “I’m not putting myself in no position to prove no point to nobody that I’m real. I been real. … It’s solid, ain’t nothin’ ever gonna change that. I don’t have anything to prove. The only thing that I gotta prove to myself is I wanna be better than I was yesterday. … That would have been an L for me to walk out of there and be like, ‘Yo, I just really lost my composure out in the world because somebody was playing with me like we in the sixth grade.’”
Jeezy also discussed why he wanted to the Verzuz, something he touched on during the event when he said that he “wanted to do this shit for the culture.”
“I just think I’ve grown—I’m quite sure he has too,” Jeezy told BigBoy around the 16:20 mark. “I just think it was God’s will that it would come back around full circle with a platform like that, at a time like this where everybody’s paying attention. … Whatever happened in the streets it’s for us to figure out right now. When we did it, I felt like for the culture, it was a thing to do. And I felt like for what I was seeing happening in the streets … I’m like, ‘This because of what people think we got going on.’ … This where we got the chance to fix that.”
Later on, Jeezy also discussed his new position at Def Jam, where, in the New Year, he’ll be starting as a senior advisor to the chairman. “This is my legacy at this point,” he said around the 30:00 mark. “I want to take some young people’s careers and change some lives, so that’s where I’m at.”
Watch the entire interview at the top.
