The huge Mustard beat rappers kept turning down: “I had the beat since 2019”
Mustard has been responsible for some of the most recognisable hip-hop beats since the early 2010s. Whether it’s Tyga’s ‘Rack City’, Big Sean’s ‘I Don’t Fuck with You’ or Kid Ink’s ‘Main Chick’, the Los Angeles producer’s signature West Coast sound can be heard in the genre’s biggest hits. However, that doesn’t mean all of his beats are snapped up instantly.
The beat-maker once revealed that one of the biggest records of his career took five years to receive a placement. Kendrick Lamar released his GNX album in November 2024, and Mustard contributed to several songs on the project. While he usually never lets anyone else hear the beats he sends to Kendrick, that wasn’t the case for ‘Hey Now’.
During an interview with People, he revealed that YG, Quavo and Ty Dolla $ign all had a chance to use the ‘Hey Now’ production. Mustard was confident in the song being a hit, having used Clipse’s ‘Grindin’ as inspiration.
“I don’t know why, but ‘Hey Now’, I had the beat since 2019 or maybe a little bit earlier than that,” he revealed. “And I made that beat by myself. I remember I played it for YG and I’m like, ‘Bro, if you do this song, I’m telling you if you can figure it out, I’m telling you it’s going to be like…’ I was trying to make a West Coast version of ‘Grindin’. That’s why it’s so empty like that. That’s why it’s just weird sounds. So when I made, ‘Hey Now’, I played it for him, he was like, ‘Ah…,’ he didn’t end up doing it.”
He continued, “I played it for Quavo and I’m like, ‘Quavo man, if you get this, if you can connect to this song, I’m telling you,’ he’s like, ‘What the hell you want me to do to it? You want me to whisper on the beat?’ And I’m like, ‘Alright.’ So I didn’t force it on him. And then Ty [Dolla $ign], me and Ty were doing some stuff and he did it and it was a good song, but I never was all the way there with it.”
After multiple artists declined, Mustard played it for Kendrick; the rest is history. The Compton rapper instantly gravitated towards the song, which charted as high as number five on the Billboard Hot 100.
“I remember I was talking to Kendrick one day and I was just like, ‘Man, I got this really weird-ass beat, but I really love it. Like, I know that I love this beat,'” he recalled. “And I sent it to him and right away he said, ‘Oh yeah, I got it.’ And I was like, ‘Alright.’ But still, I hadn’t heard it until I went to the ‘Not Like Us’ video shoot. He played me a little bit of it, but he just connected to it. So it’s like, I don’t know, man.”
Despite the Drake diss song ‘Not Like Us‘ being a number-one single that won six Grammy Awards, Mustard always preferred the ‘Hey Now’ production. Mustard offered several beats for GNX, and Kendrick picked two of them, resulting in ‘Hey Now’ and ‘TV Off’.
“When I heard ‘Not Like Us’, I wasn’t as excited about ‘Not Like Us’ as I was about ‘Hey Now’ for whatever reason,” he said. “I don’t know why, but Kendrick was more excited about ‘Not Like Us’. He was like, ‘Man, this shit is crazy.’ And I was like, ‘Alright, cool.’ That was just one of the five that I had made for him. So now I just send him everything that I do, out of the five beats a day. Sometimes I make more than five and I’ll be like, ‘OK, I want to send some beats to Travis [Scott].'”