If you ask the layman trap connoisseur to recall what set the decade in motion, most wouldn’t look back on a ball dropping or the rumbling noise of Times Square as Ryan Seacrest smiled for the cameras. 

As Dec. 2019 waned, rolling out the carpet for a pandemic to arrive, the classic Carey and Bublé-driven holiday anthems of the world seemingly went into radio silence. In their place was a simple melody accompanied by a hauntingly infectious ad-lib – a door-creaking murmur that propelled “The Box” to an 11-week tenure atop the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 charts, emphatically shifting Generation Z’s attention away from the holiday spirit. 

Before the eyes of many was a generational talent, one that younger hip-hop stans believed would stick around for quite a while.

The momentum that Roddy Ricch carried with the aforementioned single – the capstone of his debut LP “Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial,” leading the critically acclaimed project with well over a billion streams on Spotify alone – was unprecedented, and it drove the music industry into a frenzy. He had already been establishing himself as a staple of the new-age melodic trap sphere with singles such as “Down Below”and his “Feed Tha Streets” mixtape series. But with his debut project he became a Grammy-winning artist at 21 years of age, and it seemed as though the sky was the limit.

“Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial” offered a certain je ne sais quoi previously unheard by avid fans – and haters – of the melodic style. Widely-beloved artists like Lil Tjay and Rod Wave rose to stardom within the same niche, but I doubt they would’ve dared to breach the barriers of stereotypical trap musicality as fearlessly as Roddy did. 

What the latter brought to the table was an undeniably raw yet illustrious talent, with vocal inflections and flows rivaling the likes of Young Thug, and a knack for production that saw every track on PEMfBA being cut from a different cloth — fans of the shockingly introspective, gospel-esque closer “War Baby” know exactly what I mean.

This is all to say that Roddy’s fans know what he is capable of, and their expectations for his next project foresaw nothing short of a masterpiece. 

So when his second full-length LP “Live Life Fast” was released in Dec. 2021, it was inevitable that said fans would be immensely disappointed – not because the album was a poor showing, but because it didn’t satisfy the absurdly unrealistic benchmark they set. 

The negative reception is shown on paper, as LLF raked in only 62,000 first-week sales (falling well short of the 101,000 earned by Roddy’s debut) – but the harmful rejection of Roddy’s efforts can only be seen through the enormous backlash he received on social media. 

Amid the plethora of jabs reacting to Roddy’s initial drop announcement on Instagram, mostly consisting of the “mids” and garbage emojis we’ve become all-too-familiar with, was a statement that seemed to resonate with most commenters on the post.

“We need 2019 Roddy back cus wtf is this?”

Subsequent weeks included parallel reactions to everything he posted – even when the content was unrelated to music. On Feb. 5 – after getting berated even further in light of a work-in-progress snippet from an upcoming single titled “Out My Mind” – Roddy wiped his social media presence from the map, deleting all pages on all platforms.

That comment exemplifies the problem of expecting too much out of promising young artists, especially when the person in question is as indisputably talented as Roddy. We’ve all heard of the “sophomore slump” – to be fair, I was disappointed with the artistic conservatism on “Live Life Fast,” but by no means should a lackluster showing at such a young age spell the downfall of his career trajectory. The man is too talented a musician and instrumentalist to “flop” as harshly as listeners are prophesying.

Criticism is necessary for an artist to grow, and artists are well aware of that fact. But when fans start discrediting an artist’s work for not sounding like their old music, they disallow that artistic growth – they discourage ambition and conceptual exploration, and they ensure their own dissatisfaction with future releases from artists they enjoy.

To beat up Roddy Ricch for not replicating PEMfBA is to shoot down his deserved credibility before his potential has had any space to breathe – give him some creative leeway before making a judgment call.

Roddy has since reactivated his various media handles, but I wouldn’t blame the guy if he logged off of social media for good. Refer to the title of his almighty debut – if he needs to go off the grid to make magic, let us all excuse his reclusivity.