Jeezy and Gucci Mane made major headway on Thursday (November 19) when the two longtime rivals met up for their highly anticipated Verzuz battle. The tension on Atlanta’s Magic City stage was palpable and the 1.8 million viewers watching the event weren’t quite sure how it was going to end.
Fortunately for rap fans, the battle concluded with a truce. Gucci ultimately accepted Jeezy’s “olive branch” and the two were able to shake hands, putting a nearly 20-year beef to rest. But as The Snowman explained to Big Boy of 92.3 The Real, he wasn’t going to allow himself to lose his composure — no matter how much LaFlare taunted him.
“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-minute 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.’”
Some rappers might’ve cracked under the pressure. Gucci began the face-off with the 2012 Jeezy diss track “Round 1” and eventually threw on “The Truth,” another highly disrespectful record that included the line, “Go dig your partner up, nigga, bet he can’t say shit,” a reference to Gucci’s 2005 shooting and killing of Jeezy’s friend Pookie Loc.
With that, Jeezy calmly stopped the music, scolded Gucci for being immature and brought up the recent murders of King Von and Mo3, something he addressed with Big Boy.
“I just think I’ve grown — I’m quite sure he has too,” Jeezy said 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.”
Watch the interview above.