Coach K is best known now as the founder of Quality Control, the label that brought the world Migos, Lil Yachty, Lil Baby and more.
But before that, he was Jeezy‘s manager. And in a recent interview, Coach K has said that his former client was at one point “more relevant” than even JAY-Z.
The rap mogul appeared on the latest episode of the podcast Business Untitled, which dropped on Wednesday (November 15), and was asked about the moment he knew that Jeezy had really made it.
He pegged it to the July 2004 release of the rapper’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.”
Coach K then claimed that during that period, Jeezy was “more relevant” than JAY-Z.
“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.”
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.
You can see the conversation beginning at the 38:20 mark below.
Coach K isn’t the only Hip Hop figure who believes that other artists were bigger than JAY-Z in their primes. In an interview earlier this year with The Art of Dialogue, Goodie Mob member Big Gippsaid that both DMX and 50 Cent were bigger than Hov at one point.
The Atlanta rapper claimed that Dark Man X’s emergence in 1998 with It’s Dark and Hell is Hot and Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood — which made him the first living rapper to drop two No. 1 albums in the same calendar year — eclipsed JAY-Z’s own success with Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life.
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“To me, DMX was bigger than shawty, all day,” he continued. “Shawty put out two albums in one year that smoked anything he put out! And you still said he was the best?
“Fuck this industry, man, ’cause y’all still want who y’all want to be the best, but the numbers say DMX is the biggest thing walking round here. And when it wasn’t no DMX, it was 50 Cent. It was still somebody else.”
Gipp also said that “When 50 came out [with Get Rich or Die Tryin’], I ain’t hear no JAY-Z music — it just stopped playing.”