Memphis Bleek has responded to claims that when in his prime, Jeezy, was “bigger” than JAY-Z.
On Friday (November 17) the rapper caught up with TMZ, where he was asked a series of questions including his thoughts on Coach K‘s recent comments that Jeezy (real name Jay Wayne Jenkins) once had a larger influence on Hip Hop than Jay-Z.
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“Bigger where? As in weight or music?” Memphis began seemingly surprised by the question and asking for clarification. Then he talked about the ubiquity of Jeezy’s snowman icon, which the rapper began putting on t-shirts around 2005. “Jeezy is humongous. Snowman when I first went to Atlanta, the snowman I always thought was frosty. And then they told me, ‘No, it’s Jeezy.’ And so I said, ‘He’s a big muthafucka, he killed that.'”
He continued, “If you can change the snowman from being Frosty, and when a person see snowman, they think they of you? But bigger than Hov? Hov is the — c’mon man, what Drake and them say? Big as the Super Bowl.”
Watch the exchange below.
Elsewhere in the interview, Bleek addressed why he hasn’t been featured on a Hov-led project since The Blueprint²: The Gift & the Curse — though it was likely he was having some fun at the reporter’s expense.
“He know I’m nicer than him. That’s why. He know I burn him. He don’t want to put me on no record when he know I’ma smoke his boots. He like Bleek, nah. Put Bleek away. He too nice right now.”
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The comments come on the heels of Coach K’s — best known as the founder of Quality Control, the label that brought the world Migos, Lil Yachty, Lil Baby — appearance on the Business Untitled podcast. The executive also used to manage Jeezy. During the sit-down, he suggested that Jeezy was at one point “more relevant” than JAY-Z.
Coach K said that period began with the July 2004 release of Jeezy’s mixtape Tha Streetz Iz Watchin’.
“We pressed up like 100,000 [copies], put them on the streets. And within a month, the phone started ringing. We were doing the chitlin’ circuit,” he said. “We put that mixtape out in July. And by February, we did $6 million on the road. All cash. We hadn’t even put an album out yet. And then we did Trap or Die mixtape, I knew it was a wrap.”
“JAY was much bigger, but I’m saying relevant,” he argued. “It’s moments where some of these smaller artists is more relevant than the bigger artists.”
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K’s primary evidence that he offered was that “New York was on [Jeezy] like that and the whole South.” Meanwhile, he argued: “The South wasn’t really into ‘Big Pimpin,’’” referencing Hov’s 1999 hit with UGK.
