Given hip-hop’s love of bling, it’s easy to write off Maurice Richard’s nickname, Rich Boy, to an idle boast. Easy but wrong. Rich, as it turns out, is short for Richard, his last name and his father’s nickname. When young Maurice would walk around his native Mobile, Alabama, people would say,“There goes Rich’s boy.” So they’ve been calling him Rich Boy pretty much since he was born 24 years ago, in 1983.
It didn’t take Richards long, however, to live up to his name. His first single, “Throw Some D’s,” was a huge hit on radio and MTV and paved the way for the 2007 album, Rich Boy, and a succession of singles including “Boy Looka Here,” “Good Things” and “Sexy Lady.”
For all that, he knows he’s one of the lucky ones. His father owns a liquor store in the Mobile ‘hood, worked all day and watched helplessly as his son, despite seeing drug addicts, drive-by shootings and other acts of violence, was drawn to the drug dealers, who Rich Boy, by his own admission, looked up to. Without going into specifics, he admits to bad behavior that made his mother cry. That tore him up enough to want to “try something positive rather than being on the streets doing bullshit.”
More to straighten himself out than because of a passion for learning, Rich Boy got accepted to Tuskegee University to study mechanical engineering. One day, he heard some sounds coming out of a friend’s dorm room. He asked what his friend was playing, and his friend told him it was some beats he had just made. Rich Boy didn’t know you could do something like that, so his friend showed him how to do it. That was pretty much the last time Rich Boy thought about mechanical engineering.
Before long, he was spending all day making beats. “I just feel in love with music just that much,” he says on his website. “It had all my attention.”
Before the school year was done, he had sold some tracks to Roy Jones Jr., which made Rich Boy think he could make it in the record business as a rapper and a producer. He also convinced a local radio DJ, Nick at Nite, the Krunkmonster, to play one of Rich Boy’s songs, “Cold as Ice.” Before long, the DJ had made the song a local hit and Rich Boy had quit college so he could make his way as a rapper.
His next move came when he gave Polow Da Don, part of the Atlanta rap group Jim Crow, at the station on a promotional tour, a copy of his CD. The move paid off, because Polow liked the CD, flew Rich Boy to Atlanta, singed him to his record label, Zone 4 Entertainment, and put him in the recording studio.
Working in Polow’s apartment, the two had a volatile relationship, like two brothers, Rich Boy has said. “He’s like my coach. I had the talent when I met him but I didn’t actually know I had the talent. He brought it out of me and taught me how to apply the talent. Over time I worked at it and worked on taking it as far as I can.”
The finished album was much more challenging than people would expect, which made Rich Boy both proud and concerned. Worried that his tracks were too deep and different from what people were used to, he played the first single safe by putting out “Throw Some D’s,” which is probably the most commercial song on the record. “You gotta get their attention before you lead them. “cause if don’t nobody know who he is, they aint mos’ definitely gonna listen to you. You ave to get something to lure them in to at least know who you are. ‘Throw Some D’s’ did that for me.”
Even here, though, he had to rely on his mother’s influence. He had just bought a new Cadillac and drove it to his mother’s to show it off. She thought it was okay, but in need of something. “Paint it a different color or throw some D’s on it,” she told him. After that, the song, which would become Rich Boy’s signature hit, pretty much wrote itself. Rich Boy’s Momma, it turns out, really does know best.
