Maybe you can tell: I'm not very hip with the rap scene. If a song's played on the radio or on MTV, chances are I will hear about it from my mom before I have any real notion of what's going on.
Cool, huh?
This time though, CNN.com provided me with some choice information.
I heard some young kids scurry around saying, "Aw, it's Young Jeezy," the last time I manned the Borders information desk. I wondered what the heck was going on.
I had no clue that the black shirt depicting a slightly angered snowman I saw belonged to the rapper Jeezy.
Seeing it around campus a few times I though it was cute enough -- it was just too bad that the character looked so disgruntled. A friend of mine offered a somewhat uneducated response: "Maybe it means he loves the snow but hates how cold it is."
Young Jeezy, nicknamed "Da Snowman," was a drug dealer back in the day. The snowman makes sense. Jeezy brought the snow (cocaine), man.
But why in the world would you make a shirt of this? Maybe it's just me, but being a coke dealer isn't something I'd want to flaunt. And I really can't imagine an actual dealer wearing the snowman tee either.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking to hurt Jeezy's credibility. I just don't know where he's coming from.
The shirt is receiving attention from schools, parents and anti-drug campaigns alike. Apparently, a shirt portraying a cocaine affiliation isn't something you would want a child to wear. Imagine that.
Jeezy seems to deny the correlation between the snowman and drugs though.
In an interview with MTV in September, Jeezy explained that a person who wears the snowman shirt is a "young hustler."
Jeezy also said, "Snowman is a cool dude. He's a gangsta, too. There's a snowman in every 'hood, several snowmen in the 'hood. You gotta be that dude to look up to with the car and the girl. Whatever you do, be the best at it, because that's what the snowman is going to do."
All right, that sounds admirable enough. I'm still not 100 percent sure what a snowman has to do with being the best and having a car and girl.
Jeezy can't pull a quick one on everyone. As The Associated Press reported, "The snowman is made of white, grainy stuff like sugar," said 12-year-old seventh-grader Mailik Mason, standing next to his mother in a Manhattan store selling the snowman shirts. "It has to do with a certain drug, crack or coke."
Maybe the two do go together. Perhaps the person providing the snow deserves to be looked up to -- especially by the middle-schoolers wanting their parents to buy the shirt.
Just kidding.
The same AP article details the shirt's beginnings as the New Jersey based, hip-hop fashion company Miskeen Originals made a couple for Jeezy's public appearances.
The owner, Yaniv Zaken, claimed he "wasn't sure what the snowman meant until the artist explained to me that it was a drug dealer, the man delivering snow."
If Jeezy wants to continue manufacturing the snowman shirts, he might as well own up to the public about what it symbolizes. Or at least not lie about it (and to MTV of all things).
Even though it may have taken me awhile, Mason hit the meaning right on the money.
I'm pretty sure that Jeezy is not going to fool anyone.
Celeste Sepessy is a journalism and Italian freshman. You can reach her at celeste.sepessy@asu.edu.
