Roddy Ricch is responding to the criticism surrounding his album sales.
Just before Christmas, the L.A. rapper released his sophomore album LIVE LIFE FAST, which debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 with a solid 62,000 equivalent album units.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display( “gpt-adslot-4” ); });
However, it paled in comparison to his 2019 debut Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial, which opened at No. 1 with 101,000 units and spawned the chart-topping hit “The Box.”
In the days after LIVE LIFE FAST dropped, Roddy faced criticism for not performing at the same level as his debut. When he previewed his unreleased song “Out of My Mind” earlier this month, he was subjected to ridicule, which prompted him to deactivate his social media accounts.
“Guess I’m a flop now,” he wrote. “Shit crazy.”
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display( “gpt-adslot-5” ); });
Roddy Rich got to be kidding me
pic.twitter.com/7cXxj2NajB
— ZEUS (@itzbasito) February 5, 2022
In a new interview with DJ Akademiks, Roddy opened up about the pressure he faced to top his debut and how timing played a factor in the album’s first-week sales. He explained that if LIVE LIFE FAST was released earlier in the year when “Late at Night” was still putting up big streaming numbers, it would have sold more units than Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial.
“That song [‘Late at Night’] was such a crazy song that people caught on two to three months later,” he said. “If I would have dropped an album within that [time frame] and did whatever I did [62,000], I would have dropped and I would have been 180k up.”
But Roddy won’t let the haters get him down. “Just because the numbers didn’t align up or the timing or the plan didn’t really fall the way it was supposed to fall, now ni**as got this different narrative of how they wanna play it, but I know what’s going on,” he said.
“That shit is cool, they can play it however they wanna play it, but I still know I’m an earner.”
