Jeezy Reflects on Former Beef With Freddie Gibbs: 'That Process Had to Happen'

Jeezy has opened up about his reconciliation with Freddie Gibbs and suggested they “needed” to have their initial falling out.

“The way I look at it, like, you know if I got an issue or if I feel a way about someone [then] I’ma feel it,” he said at the 12:50 point when asked about his past issues with Gibbs. “But when I seen him it was just like, it was love because I never really had a problem with Gibbs. I always told him, ‘Bro you’re gonna be big. … You know, I don’t want to hold you back.’ But I just think at times, when we want the instant gratification, we don’t understand this thing takes time.”

When he bumped into Gibbs at an airport recently, as Gibbs detailed earlier this month, Jeezy told the Soul Sold Separately rapper he was “glad” to see how successful he’s been. “’I’m hearing the music, I’m seeing what you’re doing, that’s what’s up,’” he recalled. “I’m like, ‘I told you.’ We just dapped it up and chopped it up for a minute, exchanged numbers. It was love. … When you really go back and look at it, that process had to happen.”

Ultimately, he felt they walked away from the situation with a better understanding of each other, and Gibbs came out of it as a “better artist” overall. “I have a better understanding for dealing with artists and people now,” he continued. “You gotta let people have the room to feel how they feel.” Jeezy maintained that it their partnership as artists just wasn’t “the right mix,” and he always wanted to see Gibbs achieve success. “At the end of the day, I feel like that was what was supposed to happen for him, [and] he sees that now.”

In a recent interview on The Breakfast Club, Gibbs admitted that he “took it too far and made it personal” when the two started to beef. The issues supposedly arose over Gibbs’ frustrations over how he was handled at Jeezy’s CTE World label, which he eventually left after a series of disagreements. “I ain’t keep my composure,” he said, calling the whole situation a “business disagreement.”

Earlier in the interview, at the 11:20 point, Jeezy also spoke about the moment he realized that “street cred” doesn’t matter as much as he initially thought. “I really think that, when you start walking in those rooms and you trying to do business, nobody really care about what you’ve done on the streets,” he said. “As a man, you shouldn’t care about it, because what people think about me it ain’t none of my spiritual business. It’s just not, but for me… I don’t need validation by what you consider to be real for me to be a real man.”

He said that early in his career, he was motivated to do a lot of what he did in an effort to seek validation. “The last time I got locked up in L.A.—when that incident happened in the Bay—that’s when I was really like, ‘Man you got the world, you successful, you on tour. You [playing to] 30,000 people a night, and you in jail. For what? … I remember everybody calling like, ‘Yeah man woo woo,’ like it’s a real thing. I’m sitting there, going like, ‘About to throw my whole career away because I’m trying to live by a stereotype and a code.’”

Watch the full interview above.