When Roddy Ricch dropped “The Box” at the end of 2019, he couldn’t have had a clue how the next year would play out. The single, which was dropped after the album’s release, upended the social order of the Billboard charts and held onto the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 for 11 weeks in 2020. It’s already diamond-certified and its success seemingly signaled the birth of a new superstar who would reign over hip-hop for the foreseeable future.
By the same time the next year, those same fans are social media had declared his new album, Live Life Fast, DOA, and Roddy himself washed up. (Even worse, he’s currently facing a copyright infringement lawsuit over the song that supercharged his ascent, filed at the end of 2022.) Roddy suddenly saw himself dealing with both the gift and the curse of social media.
Incidentally, that’s the title of the Roddy-focused episode of RapCaviar Presents, which started streaming on Hulu today. The episode (which features yours truly as a talking head) addresses Roddy’s love-hate relationship with social media — something we touched on in Uproxx’s cover story about him — with Roddy commenting on how unnatural it all seems to him.
At the 21-minute mark of the episode, Roddy says, “A lot of people don’t have to deal with more than 10 people. So just imagine seven million that see your posts every day… Jesus only had 12 disciples, and I ain’t nowhere near Jesus… Let me be great, man.”
Check out the full Roddy Ricch episode and the rest of the RapCaviar Presents series on Hulu.
Roddy Ricch is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.