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

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 Hrishikesh Hirway. This episode contains explicit language. Hit-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 Beyoncé, 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 Ricch. Nipsey Hussle was a rapper and community activist from LA whose career was cut short tragically when he was murdered in 2019. 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.

[singing] And I've been riding solo trying to rebuild. Look, I was riding around in the V12 with the racks in the middle. Had to pray to almighty God they let my dog out the kennel. When you get it straight up out the mud you can't imagine this shit. I've been pulling up in the drop tops with the baddest bitch. Young nigga been focused on my check, mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, I go by the name of Hit-Boy. I'm on YouTube a lot. That's where I discover a lot of new artists and just new music and what's going on. So, uh, Roddy Ricch, he had a song called Die Young. This is before he was signed or anything. Like, he was just, like, 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, you know, insane in the industry." [singing] Gotta keep it on me, I wanna die young. I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by six. I'ma go and post bail, just look at my wrist. Tell me why the legends always gotta die quick.

What about that song spoke to you so much?

It was just raw. It was just real authentic, you know, and that's what I respected. So I had a homie, uh, 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 Ricch 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."

When you're looking for the next thing that you're gonna work on, how do you decide who you wanna make a beat for?

Man,