Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial

“You got to understand that at this point, I’m only two mixtapes out,” Roddy Ricch tells Apple Music. “Y'all just now beginning to see me and we gon' grow together.” The speed with which Roddy Ricch has made his name as one of the most important voices in LA rap is nearly unprecedented, but the specific leaps aren’t difficult to trace. His breakout tape Feed Tha Streets II—only the second one he made—features London On Da Track-produced “Die Young,” the song that gave him his first influx of attention. He’d follow that up by supplying fallen LA hero and friend Nipsey Hussle with an earworm of a chorus for “Racks in the Middle.” And then came “Ballin',” the runaway smash from Mustard’s Perfect Ten album that sent Ricch well on his way to becoming a household name.

Whatever's next for the Compton MC will likely come from his debut album, Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial, a project that features continued ruminations on success (“Perfect Time”), dalliances with spirituality (“Prayers to the Trap God”), and a fiery recounting of how far he's come as an artist and a human being (“Intro”). According to Ricch, it's the result of years of reflection both in and out of the studio. “I feel like progress really just comes from within,” he says. “Coming out of the streets, being a millionaire, and just knowing the different struggles that are in different people—you'll feel the progress because I'm progressing. This ain't me trying to rap, it's just me just talking to you.” Below, Ricch details some of the factors that helped him toward the project's completion.

Make It Like a Movie
“I really just make music all the time. My process is not making an album or a mixtape. I just really just do it for fun. I like working hard, but really just recording when I have the inspiration to talk about something. I really put my brain around molding songs together and putting different artists together and just making it a movie.”

Get Introspective
“I feel like ‘Intro’ came when I realized that I wasn't a normal human being. I was seeing another side of having a little bread and traveling a little bit and just trying to motivate the people behind you that you got to lead into another type of promised land. You just reflect on all that and it bleeds into the music. You just talk that shit.”

Keep a Level Head
“I'm not gon' say I'm always happy, but I'm always content. When I was really blowing up, that was just a time in my life where bad stuff was happening to me. I was losing friends—I lost my best friend to a high-speed chase. Some of my friends went to jail for four or five years after having college scholarships, not even being involved in gangs but just really just being innocent bystanders walking down the street and they just felt like sliding on your side that day. This is the stuff I was going through before I got into the position of being able to travel and really make music.”

Open Up
“If I ever have to say something, [it’s because] that’s how I was feeling that day. I just put out ‘Ballin’’ with Mustard. Everybody that listens to that song tells me that it makes them happy. It’s because at that moment in time I had patched up my wounds from a lot of the street shit I went through and I felt good that day. So now it's like the more I begin to open up and drop more songs, people are seeing that I could do different things.”

Follow Nipsey’s Example
“All my closest relatives have quit their jobs and it's a business, you know what I'm saying? My people are doing real estate, going into the trucking business, and really just trying to figure out different things. When my brothers and sisters, even my cousins and aunties are all just figuring out what their interests are, [I feel like] Moses in the Bible: leading people out of a situation and taking them into something different.”