Hit-Boy and Nipsey Hussle - Racks In the Middle (feat. Roddy Ricch and Hit-Boy)

0:00Roddy Ricch:You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirwe.

0:11Roddy Ricch:This episode of Song Exploder is brought to you by Booking.com. And I'm going to go on there right now because I've got a bunch of tour dates coming up between April and June. So I'm putting in the dates for the first city on my tour, Austin, Texas, and there are over 300 options. There's a huge variety from hotels to vacation rentals. I'm going to narrow it down to hotels and filter the results based on my budget and my tastes. And okay, there we go. There are still over 20 options for me to choose from. I'm going to look at the ones that are closest to the venue where I'm playing. And then I'm going to check out all the reviews and pick the one that feels most like me.

0:49Roddy Ricch:Besides being close to the venue, I also want to be within walking distance of great food, preferably a great dessert. And if I can find my perfect stay on booking.com, then anyone can. Find exactly what you're booking for at booking.com, booking.ya. Book today on the site or in the app. Thanks to Quince for their support of Song Exploder. There was a survey done recently that found that over 50 % of sweaters found in my closet come from Quince. That's because there are so many good ones on their site and I want all of them. For me, their cashmere sweaters fit in the exact sweet spot between casual and dressy and between effortless and put together.

1:32Roddy Ricch:So I just got a new one, the Mongolian cashmere fisherman sweater. I wore to a show last night. But that's just one tiny slice of the things that they offer over at Quince. You can also find shirts and pants and accessories and home goods and outerwear, all kinds of great clothes, all at really reasonable prices. So refresh your wardrobe at Quince. Go to quince.com slash songexploder for free shipping and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. Go to quince.com slash songexploder for free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com slash songexploder. This episode contains explicit language.

2:17Roddy Ricch:Hip Boy is an award-winning producer and rapper from LA. He's one of my all-time favorite producers, from Backseat Freestyle by Kendrick Lamar, to Sicko Mode by Travis Scott, to tracks he's made for Beyonce, Nas, and the Jay-Z and Kanye album Watch the Throne. So I was really excited to talk to him, and when I asked him which song from his incredible catalog he wanted to talk about, I was really moved by his choice. He picked Racks in the Middle by Nipsey Hussle, featuring Roddy Ridge. Nipsey Hussle was a rapper and community activist from LA, whose career was cut short tragically when he was murdered in 2019.

2:53Roddy Ricch:He'd released just one album, Victory Lap. Racks in the Middle was the last song released in Nipsey's lifetime. It went platinum, and a year after his death, it won the Grammy for Best Rap Performance in 2020. This episode features a few short clips from a video that Nipsey Hussle made for the website Genius back in 2019. There's a link to the full video that he made in the show notes. But here in the studio to tell the story, I spoke to Hit Boy about how Racks in the Middle came together.

3:20Hit-Boy:And I've been riding solo trying to rebuild. I was riding around in the V12 with the Racks in the middle. Had to pray to Almighty God, they let my dog out to kill him. When you get it straight up by the mud, you can't imagine it shit. I've been pulling up in the drop tops with the baddest bitches. Young nigga been focused on my check.

3:42Nipsey Hussle:Yeah, yeah, I'll go by the name of Hit Boy. I'm on YouTube a lot. That's why I discovered a lot of new artists and just new music and what's going on. So, Roddy Rich, he had a song called Die Young. This is before he was signed or anything. He was just an independent artist doing his thing. And I just kept playing Die Young every day at the studio. I would just come in, watch the video, show it to people, just share it. And I was just like, yo, this song is crazy. This kid is about to go insane in the industry.

4:26Roddy Ricch:What about that song spoke to you so much?

4:28Nipsey Hussle:It was just raw. It was just real, authentic, you know, and that's what I respected. So I had a homie named Knowledge who was doing some A &R work at Atlantic. So he knew that I was a fan of Roddy and I was working at a studio called Chalice. that's in West Hollywood. And Knowledge told me that Roddy Rich would be at Chalice working with Future. I didn't know if I would meet him, but I was like, man, Roddy is over here, so let me just make a beat in that Roddy vein just in case I get that moment where it's like we connect. Like, you know, I could play him a beat that's like I know almost for certain that he'll like.

5:05Roddy Ricch:When you're looking for the next thing that you're going to work on, how do you decide who you want to make a beat for?

5:11Nipsey Hussle:Man, honestly, a lot of my hits came from me not actually making the beat for anybody You know, it's just like having fun with it So I never even actually meant to be a producer Like I just was like rapping And the kid that I was in a group with made the beats Sat down at his laptop one day And I'm like, yo, this is fun Like prior to I started making beats I would play video games every day after school And I look at production like a video game The blocks looking like Tetris that sound communication with the visual is like it's a video game to me and it still is to this day just clicking these blocks and then it's like I just developed into me obsessing over it.

5:50Roddy Ricch:So how did that change like how does that work for you when you're like still trying to follow your own compass but you also have some an artist.

5:58Nipsey Hussle:So this is the thing I really get charged up and I'm able to crank out a lot of beats when I know I have a specific artist coming like if I know they're coming to see me, that puts a battery in my back. It's just more inspiration when you know, like, oh, Jay-Z want me to come through, Kanye want me to come through, Beyonce, whatever. I knew Roddy Ricch was across the way. So I'm like, let me make something that kind of feels like a progression of what Die Young is. You know what I mean? I was such a fan of that song and a fan of him off of that song. I'm like, I would like to make something with him that I feel like could fit in that world.

6:33Nipsey Hussle:And so when you have that idea in mind, where did you start? So I started with Shout To My Boy Corbett. I produced a lot of stuff with him. And he gave me that main choir that pretty much goes through the whole song.

6:51Nipsey Hussle:And it was at like a different pitch and a different tempo. I just took it, finessed it, looped that up, and then just built off of that. How did that original sound from Corbett come to you? Corbett just sends me packs, hundreds of sounds, folders. It's like, I'll just wake up to a weed transfer, just a bunch of sounds. And, you know, I'll just kind of load them up. And as I'm cooking, sometimes I'll try to drop stuff in and see how I can finesse the music into what I'm doing. And that was just a loop that I had. And when I just felt that initial feeling, it's like the harmonies, the blend, how he did it, the reverb on it.

7:28Nipsey Hussle:like everything just felt haunting West Coast, but it just felt good at the same time. Then Corbett actually came and added some more, like this little pluck key scent thing.

7:56Nipsey Hussle:Then my boy G Dave came in and did the bass line. We programmed the drums together. It was kind of like a co-production in a real way.

8:12Nipsey Hussle:You hear the bounce on the drums, like all them sounds is like a factory and everything is just working together beautifully. The counter lead, like got that wobbly sound to it, kind of pitchy.

8:31Nipsey Hussle:That's like a synth out of Omnisphere, keep the momentum up and keep the melody moving. What was your intention? What are you hoping to bring out with sounds like that? just what sounds like is still in pocket, but just sounds weird as possible. You know what I mean? Just like, let's just keep taking it to outer space.

9:00Roddy Ricch:One of the first things that we hear in the song is your Hip Boy producer tag. I was just wondering if you could tell me more about that. Like, how did that come about?

9:08Nipsey Hussle:I had that tag maybe since like 2018. I was using my tag a lot at that time because I felt like I had spent so much time before that, prior years to this song coming out and prior years to where I was at at that time in life. I was just like giving away a lot of beats, basically made nothing off those beats. And so, man, I was like, yo, I missed all them years when I could have had my tag on big beats, you know.

9:33Roddy Ricch:That's so interesting. I mean, like, because I'm somebody who always looks at the liner notes. so I always all my favorite songs I know who produced so it's never occurred to me to think that you missed out on anything by not having a tag yeah cause that's

9:45Nipsey Hussle:where the game went you know Mike Will made it DJ Mustard Metro Boomin they all like started getting invited to festivals to DJ because they had songs on the radio they had their tags on it they started getting extra money cause they had their branding more out there and it's like damn I feel like I had missed that window cause I used to be like imagine if niggas in Paris had Hit Boy in the beginning and I probably don't even know where my life will be right now. You know what I mean? So the whole day goes by. It's maybe 12 a.m., 1 a.m., something like that. It's late. And my boy Knowledge come, knock at my door.

10:20Nipsey Hussle:He's like, yo, Roddy, you want to say what up? He about to head out, but he just want to, you know, meet you. So he came in my room, just said, what's up? You know, I told him I was a fan and respected what he was doing, you know, seeing his movement, going crazy. And before he dipped, he had his backpack on and everything. It was literally like the peace out moment. I was like, let me play this beat.

10:42Nipsey Hussle:He was like, man, let me try something to load it up. Did the hook the same day. Right there on the spot.

11:14Roddy Ricch:How did that feel in that moment to have the artist come in and record something great right away?

11:20Nipsey Hussle:Following my intuition has led to most of my success. And that one was like jackpot, you know? So he laid the hook. He did a whole verse to it, actually. The next day, I'm playing a song. Everybody's going crazy. My whole team, we like, yo. So I was thinking about putting out a producer album, kind of like a Khaled-esque lane, just creating collaborations. So I was like, this could be Hit Boy featuring Roddy Ricch. And let's possibly get somebody else on it. I was thinking about who it could be. Thought about Nipsey, and it just so happened that Nipsey wanted to get in with me anyway. It had been a while since me and Nip connected, because we worked on other songs.

11:57Nipsey Hussle:I worked on Mailbox Money. I did a song with him and Rick Ross called A Hundred A Show. and we always had a rapport, had a respect for each other. He had rapped on one of my songs called Alert back in like 2013 and I'm like, man, I got to take advantage of this relationship, man. I got to give this dude a real banger, a real hit, you know? Do you remember how you two first connected the very first time? It was a song called Thugging. I think this might have been 2008, 2009, something like that. But yeah, once we reconnected, I'm like, yo, man, I just had a point to prove at that point just for myself.

12:30Nipsey Hussle:I just wanted to make as many bangers as possible for all the artists that wanted to work with me. So we linked up. I played Nipsey, Racks in the Middle. He was like, yo, run that back. I played it for him again. He was like, bro, I need this song for my next album post-Victory Lap, because he was working on that for years. That was his only album. And he was like, this song, Racks in the Middle, can help me usher in my new wave, my next moment, leading up to the new album. you know so um i just you know on the spot i'm like cool let's do it the story of racks in the middle continues after this song exploder is sponsored by distro kit if you're an independent

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14:30Roddy Ricch:Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash songexploder. Go to shopify.com slash songexploder. Again, that's shopify.com slash songexploder. Song Exploder is sponsored by Gusto. When I started Song Exploder, I hoped that one day it could maybe turn into a job. And then it did, which was great, but it also brought all this admin work with it. And anybody who's tried to start a small business knows that it can be really daunting and time-consuming to deal with stuff like payroll and taxes, and if you're lucky, benefits. But that's where Gusto comes in. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software that's built for small businesses.

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15:49Nipsey Hussle:Nipsey and Roddy was already cool, you know what I mean? So they had respect for each other, and everything just made sense.

15:55Roddy Ricch:Here's Nipsey Hussle talking about when he first heard what Hit Boy and Roddy Ricci had made.

16:00Hit-Boy:Just the way it dropped, it sounded new, but it was banging. I got killers to the left of me, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Then when I heard what he was saying, I had a song in my head for it already. I know the story he's telling, and, you know, the place he represented, I know about that place, so I understand it.

16:17Nipsey Hussle:So he muted Roddy's verse and he kept the Roddy hook And he ended up putting three verses on it We was lurking on her, ain't show no mercy on her

16:27Hit-Boy:We was going back to back, we put a curfew on her It was dark clouds on us, but that was perfect for us We know you always crash and burn, but it was working for us

16:37Nipsey Hussle:Nipsey was one of the realest guys I ever met Very authentic, very gangster