Rick Ross, who dropped his latest album, Richer Than I Ever Been, spoke to HotNewHipHop in a wide-ranging interview.
During the chat, Ross reflected on the loss of Nipsey Hussle and Young Dolph and compared it to the deaths of 2Pac and Biggie. “Losing Nipsey and Dolph for this generation, I’m sure, was just as equivalent or greater to what [Notorious] B.I.G. or ‘Pac was for my generation,” Ross, who tried to sign Nipsey to Maybach Music Group, said.
Hussle was fatally shot outside of Marathon Clothing store in South Los Angeles on March 31, 2019 while Dolph was shot and killed outside of Makeda’s Homemade Butter Cookies in Memphis on November 17, 2021. Biggie and 2Pac were also both fatally shot, with the former dying at the age of 24 and the latter at the age of 25.
Elsewhere in the interview, Ross spoke about curating down his Richer Than I Ever Been from from a daunting 64 songs to a lean 12 tracks long.
The standard edition of the record, which arrived in December last year, is his shortest album since 2010’s Teflon Don. Ross explained that he wanted a clean 12-song record and as a result, there’s not some of the flashy collaborations that some fans have come to expect from his projects.
“I remembered when I cut it down to 64 [songs], and I was like, ‘okay, out of these [64], I’m going to pick twelve,’” he said. “You got to understand that I got some of the biggest n***as in the game that I know, but it wasn’t about that. Let’s give them this. N***as know we could call up the big homies and blow up a f***** building in the background with Little X as the director. N***as know we could do that. That’s easy. I can do that out of my pocket; I don’t even need the label for that.
“I could fuckin’ get Spider-Man to come in and do the fucking –,” he said, mimicking Spidey’s web-slinging. “Like, the real [Spider-Man]. That’s the homie, but it ain’t about that. Let’s go back and sit down with some n***as and do ‘Rapper Estates,’ let’s do ‘The Pulitzer.’” The former of those tracks features Benny the Butcher, while “The Pulitzer” sees Rozay go over a simple but hard-hitting Timbaland beat. By contrast to some of his flashier releases, which frequently feature a glossy collab with Drake, Richer Than I Ever Been is decidedly stripped-back.
Prior to the arrival of the project, he teased songs with both Drizzy and Lil Baby, but those songs never surfaced. “I got records with the both of them, of course,” he said. “Baby did some dope ass shit. It came down to one of those things where we wanted to keep it short, let’s keep it clean, let’s give it to them just like this. Drake is great, that’s the homie. Baby is that homie, that’s the lil’ homie, and they come through, and I appreciate the way they come through for me.”
Ultimately, he said he didn’t feel “pressure” to deliver on the features front, and instead he chose to focus on making the “dopest shit” possible. “We could go and get Madonna, Kanye, click over and call—we could do that, but we need to remind them the fundamentals of what a boss is,” added Rozay.
Read the full interview here.
