Dequantes Lamar dropped the summer hip-hop hit 'Type of Way' in 2013 under his teenage nickname, Rich Homie Quan. He first considered a career in professional baseball, but in 2008, the Atlanta native dropped the single 'Stay Down' featuring the Stack Money Boyz. Things came to a halt when he landed in jail for a year on burglary charges, but upon his release in 2011, Quan began to make up for lost time.
May 13, 2015 the whole vault is leaking day after day for all the weird shyt associated with dude, this music (for anyone who is a geniune fan of their specific brand of melodic trap) is absolutely incredible. A place to discuss the Drip God himself, Young Thug.
Hooking up with the Atlanta crew Loyalty Ova Royalties and becoming quick friends with member CEO Teezy came next, but Teezy's untimely death later in the year put a stop to Quan's planned mixtape debut. He would re-emerge a year later on the T.I.G.
Label and drop the mixtapes I Go in on Every Song plus Still Goin' In. The year 2013 began with a tour opening for Trinidad James, along with a guest appearance on Gucci Mane's Trap House 3 album. In the summer, he dropped the infectious club track 'Type of Way,' which cracked Billboard's Hot 100 chart. Rich Homie Quan released a fistful of mixtapes, and in 2016 he landed a record deal with Motown.
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March 2017 saw the release of the single 'Replay,' which appeared on the Back to the Basics mixtape, his debut release for Motown. Led by the singles 'Change' and '34,' Quan's debut album, Rich in the Spirit, was released in March 2018. David Jeffries.
It’s a relatively normal Sunday night on Twitter, when a zip file of over 100 songs from Rich Gang is mysteriously and rapidly passed through DMs. Whether you like the unorthodox cocktail of Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan is irrelevant—the music within the circulated file is new and easily consumable with a Google Drive or Zippyshare link. The songs range from unfinished skeletons to songs heard elsewhere like on Young Thug’s Barter 6 mixtape (renamed as “Original Versions” here) and even elusive tracks heard in Instagram snippets. There’s a now more manageable 40-track version of the leak with only Young Thug songs. All of this just weeks after his first solo project in two years and a few months after most thought the spout on his unreleased old material had been sealed shut.Users from the massively popular Internet message boardclaim that the stockpile of these songs has been building since about 2013.
“The songs are getting leaked because Thug’s security is awful at securing his music,” a user who requested to be anonymous says. The songs were collected from mutual friends or people believed to be within Thug’s circle and kept in a shared drive between a few other users of the subforum, as a way to compile Thug’s weirdest and most exclusive music.
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“It was about 58 Young Thug songs, 38 songs from Rich Homie Quan, and some Skooly and Lucci in that folder.” The user maintains that there was no vendetta against Thug or anyone in Rich Gang, adding that “somehow it ended up on atrilli.net and that’s all she wrote.” POST CONTINUES BELOW. The adoption of album and song leaks into the current model of being “first” is one that is now more harmful than it was almost a decade ago, and is starting to affect more than the artists it used to give a buzz. Engineer, who works exclusively with the creative pool of upcoming artists and producers like Young Thug, Travi$ Scott, Metro Boomin, and TM88, to express his frustration at what he calls “two years of his life” that have been lost to this massive leak.
In his solemn post, he mentions that it’s unlikely that the unfinished songs will ever be mastered or released at this point, which he said will probably rob fans of official releases of some “amazing tracks.” POST CONTINUES BELOW. Tumay is right in his assessment. The collection of songs exhibits an assortment of Thugger's sonic experiments, some of which, like “Dripset,” “Love Me,” and standout collaboration with could be massive hits this summer.
The leak also included a Rich Homie Quan song which contained very vile and. It’s a lose-lose situation for not only Tumay (who Thug shouts out repeatedly in these leaks) but for a-list producers like London on da Track or Metro Boomin, who produced a lion share’s of the unreleased material.
The tracks are all solid contenders for inclusion on one of Thug’s many unreleased projects like Metro Thuggin or the second Rich Gang compilation, which was supposed to drop last year. There are probably even loosies here that could have found their way onto his upcoming album; an album that will make or break the already divisive opinion on Thug. POST CONTINUES BELOW. The excitement of new music, or at least grabbing hold of an exclusive b-side, has turned into an ugly, almost Pokemon-esque subculture that is all about bragging rights.“My theory is that whoever had the songs was trading all 100 for a few Drake leaks, and he got finessed,” another user from KTT, who requested to be anonymous, added.
Every song from their shared folder was leaked, including custom mash ups that they made like “Boy/How to Be Real (Remix),” which splices a verse at the end of Thug’s song with a verse from Wiz Khalifa’s “How to Be Real” from 2014’s 28 Grams mixtape. The anonymous nature of this is only more perplexing, as the user added that “It’s clear that someone in my circle did something real fucking stupid.
It’s just hard to figure it out when you only know them on the Internet.” There’s no loyalty between music —that person may have wished and hoped for some new raps from Drake but found himself in the middle of one of the biggest music leaks of the past few years.The obsession with being “first,” and the increasingly ADD nature of this generation of music consumers, creates a disappointing reality: There isn’t anyone who will be deciphering or absorbing these songs like they would if the songs were released the way the artist intended. In an industry where it’s becoming increasingly harder to keep the attention of listeners, this was just a Sunday. Some songs leaked, a dude in his basement told another guy on Twitter which ones were “fire,” and life went on.
POST CONTINUES BELOW. In his Reddit post, Tumay stressed that the “impact” of these leaked songs has been lessened because of their unlawful release, and he’s completely right.
For all of his and Rich Gang’s hard work to ensure that their fans got the best quality music, the same amount of effort needs to be applied by the people in charge of keeping these records secure. If normal people can build a catalog of an artist’s music behind the guise of a message board, then the blame rests firmly on the shoulders of the camp.
Leaks aren’t going anywhere, but until the industry can plug their own spouts, this is a decade-old problem that will continue to get worse.Justin Davis is a writer living in L.A.