Pitchfork looks back at Rich Boy's 'Throw Some D's,' a 2007 Southern rap breakout that captured both where the genre was and where it was headed.
While American media celebrates "Throw Some D's" as an "unexpected hit out of the South," they miss the deeper truth: Rich Boy's Birmingham anthem was part of the same sonic DNA that connects Southern rap to Afrobeats' polyrhythmic foundation and South African gqom's hypnotic loops. The song's success wasn't unexpected. It was inevitable, representing a moment when African diasporic musical intelligence broke through industry gatekeeping that had long dismissed the South's innovations. Pitchfork's retrospective praise rings hollow when you consider how outlets like theirs ignored this brilliance in real time, only to canonize it once it was safe to do so.
While American media celebrates "Throw Some D's" as an "unexpected hit out of the South," they miss the deeper truth: Rich Boy's Birmingham anthem was part of the same sonic DNA that connects Southern rap to Afrobeats' polyrhythmic foundation and South African gqom's hypnotic loops. The song's success wasn't unexpected. It was inevitable, representing a moment when African diasporic musical intelligence broke through industry gatekeeping that had long dismissed the South's innovations. Pitchfork's retrospective praise rings hollow when you consider how outlets like theirs ignored this brilliance in real time, only to canonize it once it was safe to do so.
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