A month before his 36th birthday, Young Jeezy has decided to drop the Young. The Atlanta rapper has announced that, for the first time, he will style himself plain old Jeezy on his forthcoming fifth studio LP.
Jeezy revealed the change during a recent appearance on MTV's RapFix Live, correcting the presenter who introduced him. "It's [just] Jeezy now," he said. "I'm grown now. I did enough of that."
Jeezy's first indie album came out about 12 years ago, under the alias Lil J. He has since released more than a dozen mixtapes, and four major label full-lengths, all of which reached the top tier of the US billboard. In the UK, Jeezy has featured on hit singles such as Christina Milian's Say I and Usher's Love in This Club.
With his birthday on 12 October and the followup to 2011's TM: 103 due later this year, the rapper explained that he is due a change.
"[The decision] sounds good because when I came into the game, that's what I was and that was my state of mind. But I'm a grown man now," he said.
While it may appear an appropriate move for a man in his mid-30s, many MCs seem reluctant to shed their diminutives. Young Buck, Lil Wayne, Young Noble and many more maintain their petite nomenclatural statures. Maybe Jeezy has been chatting with the former Lil Bow Wow, who decided he was grown up in 2002 – at the age of 15.
