Big chips With everyone from k-os to Busta Rhymes rapping over his beats, T-dot producer/MC Rich Kidd stacks up the kudos There’s one catch-22 that grinds every ambitious person down: when you’re young, you’re supposed to keep hustling all the time, and, at the same time, wait patiently for success. But if recognition isn’t coming fast enough for Rich Kidd’s liking, he doesn’t show it.
His alias implies that he’s an indolent brat, and in that sense, calling Ritchie Acheampong “Rich Kidd” is like calling a fat man Tiny. Leaning in conspiratorially as the midday sun streams in the windows of a Liberty Village café, the Scarborough-born, Mississauga-raised MC and producer tells me he’s been taking hip-hop seriously since high school. After putting in work freestyling at parties and plugging away at his PC making beats, he started making connections, which judging by the range of artists he linked up with even early on — from underground GTA legends like Fatski to fellow up-and-coming Sauga rapper JD Era — is something Rich Kidd is very good at.
“Ain’t no time like the present, know what I mean?” At the moment, though, he’s thinking about the future, and his new Mac’s role in it. “It’s not really in my budget to get it right now, but fuck, I need it. It’ll make me more money in the future. Everything’s about investing in your future. Not a lot of people do that.
“I, for one, like, was in the beginning, like some beat money I was getting, I wasn’t investing in shit. I was just taking it, spending it, going to parties, spending the money and stuff like that. But now I’m trying to really save up and get equipment and really build my skill, my arsenal.”
Even when he was using run-of-the-mill computer speakers to mix the beats he was selling to local MCs like Aristo, Rich Kidd was working on his craft at the heel of mentors like 40/40 and Saukrates at the Remix Project, a popular local youth program he now helps out with. That, and the snowballing popularity of his production work, led to one of his beats ending up on an album by Detroit MC duo Frank N Dank, alongside tracks from Oh No and even the late J Dilla. After that, it was open season; looking at the track lists of his self-released compilations, We On Some Rich Kidd Shit volumes one through three, you might as well list local MCs he hasn’t worked with.
On the recent third volume, alongside major Rich Kidd–produced singles like k-os’ “I Wish I Knew Natalie Portman,” sick rhymes of his own (“breeze and sunset / roof open, breathe the ’sess, smoking ease and catching that release”), and “Undescribable,” a track by Billy Danze of M.O.P. and featuring none other than Busta Rhymes — we’ll be coming back to that — one particularly clever track stands out: Bishop Brigante’s “Lost My Money,” an odyssey about the highs and lows of gambling with more tension than a high noon standoff in a John Wayne movie.
“For that track, [Bishop] was just telling me, ‘I got a sick idea for this,’” he explains, chuckling slightly as he explains the MC’s tendency to take his time in the studio. “But when he played it for me, I was, like, this is an actual sick track. People are gonna feel it because ’nuff people lose they money at the poker table.” Online reactions to the song came swiftly. “People were like putting pictures of the World Poker Tournament thing on the internet, like, ‘yo, I’m losing my hand right now and I’m listening to this song!’”
The story of how one of Rich Kidd’s tracks ended up with Busta Rhymes and one half of M.O.P. spitting over it without knowing whose it was is still somewhat shrouded in mystery, but once the producer got wind of it, he started trying to get in touch. After fruitless attempts to go through G-Unit (M.O.P.’s former label), Billy Danze eventually responded to a MySpace message and the pair even started working on more tracks.
“Basically, [Danze] told me like he did a demo on the track and sent it to Busta to try something on it, who did his thing on it and loved the beat. Busta actually leaked the track, so it was beyond their control; [“Undescribable”] wasn’t, like, an official release. Busta just wanted to release it in anticipation of his album [Back On My Bullshit]. So, they dropped the track, and then after [Danze and I] talked, we started working. We cut two more joints; we’re basically saying, ‘let’s work on an EP, get some shit out there.’
“DJ Premier mixed that shit, too. So when he told me that, I was, like, ‘aight, you got a legend to mix my joint, so…’.”
By the sounds of it, “Undescribable” won’t be the last time veterans get their hands on a Rich Kidd beat. He’s hoping to be part of a regular series with T-dot producers Marco Polo, Frank Dukes and MoSS, as well as continuing to produce, perform and educate locally (along with Remix Project, he’s also involved with a group called Lost Lyrics which uses hip-hop to help work with kids in areas like Jane and Finch and Malvern. Both programs, he notes, are accepting students.) And when the time is right, Rich Kidd wants to start collecting his props down south.
“People say they’re whispering my name, they’re hearing some shit that I’m doing down there, so I wanna just go down there and really smash it out down there, see the artists I could work with. Internet gets there, but you have more of an impact if you’re there yourself, pushing your shit. If you’re really on the hustle, they see that you’re ready to go get it instead of just waiting for it.”
