The song Roddy Ricch admitted to contemplating suicide: “I wanted to die”
Roddy Ricch took the world by storm in 2020 with his hit single, ‘The Box’. The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 11 weeks and made him a global star. While the Compton rapper may have struggled to reach the same success since, he’s still delivering quality music and putting even more of his personal life into his music, including some of the darkest moments of his life.
His debut album, Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial, reached number one on the Billboard 200 in December 2019, with his follow-up, Live Life Fast, arriving in 2021. The project included the single ‘Late at Night’, but a deeper cut stole the show. The song ‘Crash the Party’, produced by D Keyz and Yakree, saw Roddy open up about contemplating suicide.
The track touches on gang activity and paranoia, stemming from growing up in his hometown of Compton, California. “I was walkin’ through Compton one night at like— ahem, like 2am in the morning,” he explains on the record. “I just left my girl house, I found out she was on some bullshit, you know what I’m sayin’? And I walked past the 91, I was walkin’ all the way down Central, past the graveyard and shit.
“I had made a l— a right on Alondra, um, walked up by the side of the airport and I passed the hood, you know what I’m sayin’, and I went all the way to The Cedars. I had pulled up on my DJ at the time and he was just tellin’ me keep my head up and shit like that. Shit was crazy, you know? I felt like I wanted to die, I felt like I ain’t even wanna be no more ’cause I just— I ain’t have shit at the time, you know what I’m sayin’?”
However, music kept him going, giving him the strength to pull himself out of his difficult situation. “Music was all I really had,” he said. “So you know, just from goin’ to jail and fucking around in the streets, I knew it wasn’t shit. So I had to just, keep my head up, keep goin’, get focused, grind that shit out, you know what I’m sayin’?”
His confession was remarkable considering how much he keeps himself to himself. He’s not the type to sit down for lengthy interviews, with his album Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial having its title for a reason. Instead, he typically opts to let the lyrics speak for themselves.
“I ain’t never been no internet n*gga,” he told Complex. “Sometimes I want to tell people things, but I’m not the type of person to just talk into a camera. So I’ll say things, and it’ll almost be like a poem that I can share with people. It may never come out, but I’m just expressing myself. I don’t talk to people through a phone. You’ve always known me to communicate through music, so why should I have to communicate through a live video with you?”