Roddy Ricch – The Box: Fl Studio Hip Hop Beat Remake
Roddy Ricch’s “The Box” is 2020’s biggest hit, and it has gone viral having peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for twelve weeks so far. It was released at the end of 2019 on Roddy’s debut album, Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial, which reached No. 1 on Billboard, and later on Roddy Ricch won his first Grammy for his collaboration, “Racks in the Middle,” with his late mentor and friend, Nipsey Hussle. The success of “The Box” has become a compelling story in that its popularity has been completely fan-driven, going viral on platforms like TikTok.
The music video made pays homage to classic hip-hop gangster tropes with specific references to gang violence and drug deals in popular culture rather than just generic call-outs to money, fame, and women. It also sees the Compton MC race cars, play basketball, rap on a factory conveyor belt, and be put on display in a museum as well as pursued by a S.W.A.T. team, and stands on the wall of a burning building. Having worked on “Ballin” and “Tip Toe”, director Christian Breslauer, in an interview with Complex about the music video, talked about the album saying “’The Box’ was special, and immediately began writing a music video treatment for it…we shot an entire video inside of a box,” he recalls. “We shot a video of people trying to smash Roddy out of this box that’s impenetrable.”
The beat itself was quite fairly simple with production handled by producers 30 Roc and Dat Boi Squeeze. It’s fairly difficult to be in any corner of the Internet right now without having heard “The Box” or more specifically, its distinctive squeaking sound effect that has drawn comparison to an alien UFO sound signal, a squeegee being wiped on a window or a door creaking open and closed. “I made the song and then I put the little door noise at the end, after the song was done,” Roddy Ricch told Billboard in an interview. Producer 30 Roc further recalled how the track came together in an interview with Genius News: “When it came down to ‘The Box,’ for me, it was just like, let’s see if we can push him outside of his range. I really didn’t think he was going to do it. […] Then [Roddy] came and he was like, ‘EHH ERR, EHH ERR,’ and we all looked at each other…”
