When Polow da Don remoted these three bittersweet chords, pedaling between main and minor, he should’ve recognized. These chords—taken from the prolonged intro to the 1979 smooth-soul jam “I Name Your Identify,” by the Ohio-based band Swap—urged each dawning pleasure and nagging fear, ahead movement and hesitation. They don’t simply transfer; they glide. They recommend dramatic entrances, receding horizons. They trace that one thing superb may be over the subsequent rise.
He looped these three chords into 4 bars, inserting one other hiccuping little loop within the center. The end result was a bottled hit of giddy anticipation: The beat to “Throw Some D’s” swoons grandly into view, then does so once more, then does so once more. Each time that third stair-step chord hits, new vistas open up, and we eagerly scan the environment for brand new info. Throughout its 4 minutes, “Throw Some D’s” climbs that little three-chord staircase roughly 18 instances, and Polow sends new sonic cartoon characters scurrying throughout the body with every repetition.
He fades the chords, in order that they arrive to us from someplace tinnier and additional off. He unleashes the large 808s. He cuts the beat fully when Wealthy Boy’s blaring voice enters. He buries a five-hit tom roll close to the ocean flooring of the combination, the place you reliably sense its presence however by no means discover it.
He can’t go away these three superb chords alone. He throws slowing-vinyl results on them; he decorates them with six completely different tracks of beeping keyboards, draped throughout the beat like tinsel. Each millisecond of the monitor is imprinted with an impact, and but the combination has miles of area. It’s doable that no rap track is as filled with element and incident as “Throw Some D’s.”
After which there’s Wealthy Boy, who drops into the track with the identical funhouse trap-door vitality as all the consequences, blaring his opening line: “RICH BOY SELLING CRACK.”
Wealthy Boy owed his whole rap profession to Polow da Don. The 2 first crossed paths in 2001, when Wealthy Boy was Maurice Richards, a soon-to-be dropout at Tuskegee College, learning mechanical engineering. He was additionally an aspiring rap producer, and though Polow graciously accepted Richards’ beat CD, he additionally inspired Richards to modify to rapping. Within the late ’90s, Polow launched two strong, closely Goodie Mob-indebted information as a part of the Atlanta rap trio Jim Crow earlier than they misplaced their deal, and perhaps he heard one thing of that group’s funk and darkness in Richards’ voice.
The 2 stayed shut over the subsequent few years. Richards took Polow’s recommendation, releasing a DJ Drama mixtape and popping up on Ludacris compilation cuts, and Polow pushed to the middle of the pop-rap world, producing celebration tracks for radio-friendly artists like Jamie Foxx, Will Smith, Ludacris, and the Black-Eyed Peas. Polow and Wealthy Boy appeared to share one thing deep: a rigidity, a connection, an understanding of how they needed music to sound and really feel. Each of them wanted the opposite to unlock their latent promise.
