Roddy Ricch Responds To Fans Comparing NBA Youngboy’s Album Cover To His

It turns out Roddy Ricch isn’t just antisocial — he also hates being compared to anyone else, even when there’s a pretty good reason for it. When fans on Twitter began suggesting that another rapper had copied the cover from Roddy’s debut album, Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial, the Compton rapper stepped in to remind them that “it’s only ONE Roddy,” although he made sure to clarify that he wasn’t trying to disrespect the younger rapper, Youngboy Never Broke Again — aka NBA Youngboy.

Youngboy, who has steadily grown in popularity over the past several years despite spending much of that time either incarcerated or under investigation for a litany of violent crimes including domestic assault of his girlfriend in 2018, announced his major label debut album Top yesterday, posting the album’s cover to his social media. Almost instantly, fans picked up on the similarities between Top and Antisocial, from the desaturated hue to their similar wardrobe and disaffected facial expressions.

Twitter lit up with memes and jokes, as fans lit into Youngboy for “stealing Roddy’s flow.” Some joked that they thought the cover was for a deluxe version of Roddy’s album, making light of the trend of nearly every major label rapper releasing new music as a “deluxe version” of a released album to goose streaming stats and generate revenue without touring to rely on.

While Youngboy fans were quick to point out that Roddy was hardly the first artist to use a simple black-and-white photo for an album cover, that didn’t stop the memes from reaching Roddy’s eyes, prompting the above mentioned response. He followed up 30 minutes later to elaborate that while he “been f*cced wit dude,” he was just “tired of all this comparing sh*t.” He then deleted both tweets, perhaps looking to avoid extending the attention the situation would get — a good practice for any public figure online to get into, actually.

In the end, it probably wouldn’t be too surprising if Youngboy — who is 20 — was at least a little inspired by Roddy, who’s 21. With the accelerated cycle of stardom created by streaming and the democratization of hip-hop, more and more young stars have been counting their peers among their influences as much or more than their predecessors. It’s no great shock if a kid barely out of his teens knew more about his contemporaries and took some creative cues from them — after all, they do it musically all the time. It’s just a short walk to extend it to other aspects of their brands. Hip-hop is all about creating and following trends, so who knows: maybe we’ll see even more artists taking the plain and simple approach to their album covers in the future.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.