“It all spread extremely quickly, man, like a virus or something.”
DJ Rapid Ric received a three-way phone call early last week about “Gettin’ High,” an unfinished song he wrote with D-Madness, leaking onto the Internet. The rainy day blunt anthem, which features verses from Devin the Dude, B.o.B., and Cory Mo and spots local Chalie Boy on the hook, was meant to stay in the vault until Whut It Dew: The Album drops, but an unknown insider had other ideas. Not a terrible ordeal in principle, according to Ric, except the song got labeled incorrectly on almost every blog it hit.
“I think when it first hit nahright.com it just said ‘B.o.B. featuring Devin the Dude.’ So, you know, as soon as that happened I was getting phone calls and texts and tweets and all kinds of shit back and forth. We just weren’t ready for that song to leak, and we especially weren’t expecting that song to leak without our names on it.”
With the dust settled, Ric’s modus operandi has been to find the upside on all that went down. “It ended up being kind of a cool, I think. You just try to make the best of it and remember that a lot of people got to hear the song. It was kind of a promotional tool, and it was a good little vehicle to get us moving on this thing. We just had to move a lot quicker than we’d hoped.”
As for the much-anticipated album, it may be best to remember that good things come to those who wait. Ric, well known for his work running the Whut It Dew series and a regular behind the tables for Chamillionaire, has never released an LP under his name but certainly understands the magnitude of the undertaking.
“We’re really not planning on dropping this project until late summer at the earliest,” he says. “I’m just trying to stay in the studio as much as possible and link up with other artists besides B.o.B. and Devin. We’ve got a song with Slim Thug coming out and one with Paul Wall, one with Lil’ Keke. We even have a song with South Park Mexican, who’s incarcerated right now and hasn’t been able to make recordings with anyone else. We’re just trying to get as many songs together as possible so that we have more to choose from when it comes time to get the album ready.
“It just depends on the timing of a few things, because I’d like to drop it after Chamillionaire’s [Venom] comes out.”
Not surprisingly, finding a cut of “Gettin’ High” proves as easy as Googling the track name and looking past the first fold, but you can also sneak a listen here.
This article appears in April 17 • 2009.