One morning I woke up and suddenly Tommy Richman went from the white boy Brent Faiyaz took under his wing to a viral pop-R&B sensation. The track that carried him there was an intentionally grainy snippet of “Million Dollar Baby,” which shot to the stars on TikTok. In the clip, uploaded in April, Richman and his crew are in the studio, bumping along to the vibey single as the volume is cranked up so loud that the drums crackle like you’re watching a 360p rip of ’90s Three 6 Mafia footage on YouTube.
The song resonated so strongly that one of the two versions of the song uploaded to streaming services was labeled “Million Dollar Baby (VHS),” made to recapture the way his frothy melodies are drowned out by the blown-out bounce. Instantly it was one of the biggest hits of the year, eventually peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. It happened so fast that it drew some outrage, from loudmouthed podcaster Joe Budden who said, “I never wanna hear that Tommy Richman nigga again!” and Hot 97’s Funk Flex who exclaimed, hilariously, “If you’re someone that likes this song, you are a clown!” before playing the track anyway as if he was being held at gunpoint.
As someone all for shitting on the overplayed pop song of the moment, Flex and Budden were doing a lot. Actually, “Million Dollar Baby” is pretty cool. It’s about absolutely nothing but that doesn’t matter because of all the songs you’re prone to hear on the radio or at a bar it sounds distinct enough to stand out every time it comes on. Richman takes his label boss Brent’s laid-back falsetto up a notch and mashes that trendy vocal style with a thudding beat that sounds like the early 2010s Memphis-inspired thunderstorms of Bones brightened with some extra synths. And if you squint hard enough, his ghostly croons have a touch of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony to them, but, of course, without the emotional weight.
The music Richman was making before “Million Dollar Baby” had some of these qualities, too, as the 24-year-old Woodrbidge, Virginia native, who is said to be named after the drummer of Mötley Crüe, has been tinkering with these airy vocals inside of hit-or-miss genre experiments for years now. The best stuff was either borderline beachy indie rock or Brent gone groovy. There’s a sick feature he has on the 2023 mixtape of Maryland producer Sparkheem—a co-producer of “Million Dollar Baby” popular for his go go-infused DMV crank—that had me wondering if he was born to be one of those R&B hook specialists in an old rap clique, like Doughboy Clay of Doughboyz Cashout or Mo B. Dick of No Limit. But Coyote isn’t as interesting as any of that, choosing to tone down much of the hip-hop influence for safe, inoffensive playlist-R&B.
