When Polow da Don isolated those three bittersweet chords, pedaling between major and minor, he must’ve known. Those chords—taken from the extended intro to the 1979 smooth-soul jam “I Call Your Name,” by the Ohio-based band Switch—suggested both dawning joy and nagging worry, forward motion and hesitation. They don’t just move; they glide. They suggest dramatic entrances, receding horizons. They hint that something glorious might be over the next rise.
He looped those three chords into four bars, inserting another hiccuping little loop in the middle. The result was a bottled hit of giddy anticipation: The beat to “Throw Some D’s” swoons grandly into view, then does so again, then does so again. Every time that third stair-step chord hits, new vistas open up, and we eagerly scan our environment for new information. During its four minutes, “Throw Some D’s” climbs that little three-chord staircase roughly 18 times, and Polow sends new sonic cartoon characters scurrying across the frame with each repetition.
He fades the chords, so they arrive to us from somewhere tinnier and further off. He unleashes the massive 808s. He cuts the beat entirely when Rich Boy’s blaring voice enters. He buries a five-hit tom roll near the ocean floor of the mix, where you reliably sense its presence but never notice it.
He can’t leave those three glorious chords alone. He throws slowing-vinyl effects on them; he decorates them with six different tracks of beeping keyboards, draped across the beat like tinsel. Every millisecond of the track is imprinted with an effect, and yet the mix has miles of space. It’s possible that no rap song is as full of detail and incident as “Throw Some D’s.”
And then there’s Rich Boy, who drops into the song with the same funhouse trap-door energy as all the effects, blaring his opening line: “RICH BOY SELLING CRACK.”
Rich Boy owed his entire rap career to Polow da Don. The two first crossed paths in 2001, when Rich Boy was Maurice Richards, a soon-to-be dropout at Tuskegee University, studying mechanical engineering. He was also an aspiring rap producer, and although Polow graciously accepted Richards’ beat CD, he also encouraged Richards to switch to rapping. In the late ’90s, Polow released two solid, heavily Goodie Mob-indebted records as part of the Atlanta rap trio Jim Crow before they lost their deal, and maybe he heard something of that group’s funk and darkness in Richards’ voice.
The two stayed close over the next few years. Richards took Polow’s advice, releasing a DJ Drama mixtape and popping up on Ludacris compilation cuts, and Polow pushed to the center of the pop-rap world, producing party tracks for radio-friendly artists like Jamie Foxx, Will Smith, Ludacris, and the Black-Eyed Peas. Polow and Rich Boy seemed to share something deep: a tension, a connection, an understanding of how they wanted music to sound and feel. Both of them needed the other to unlock their latent promise.
