Yelawolf recently spoke to Complex.com about his recently released Shady Records debut Radioactive, explaining how each track came to be. During the interview, Catfish Billy reflected on recording album standout “Throw It Up”
featuring Gangsta Boo and Eminem, noting that the female rapper didn’t initially want to spit over such a sparse beat.
“I told Gangsta Boo, who I had called out for a session, ‘This is the record.’ When the hook came up she was like, ‘What the fuck? There’s no drums. It just loses its bop.’ She actually recorded the hook over the drum loop. Then I just arranged the music up under it,” he said. “The whole point was to create a juxtaposition with her and I. I wanted the music to be pretty, but I wanted it to be darker on the verses. I wanted her to come crazy hard because the music’s got a beautiful melody. After we recorded it, I knew it was another super-banger.”
Yela asked his Shady boss Eminem to hop on the cut, though he wasn’t sure if he could make it happen. After he managed to wrangle his two guest features, the record became a “mindfuck.”
“It was kind of like taking 8 Mile and putting it with Hustle & Flow. If I got that feature from Marshall, I wanted to bring him into my zone, my culture. And he fucking murdered it. It’s one of those records that, to me, as far as hip-hop and culturally on this project, is one of the most important records because of what it says about us as a team at Shady.
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“Us three on the same record is a mindfuck,” he continued. “It’s almost like it shouldn’t be, but it is and it’s dope. That’s the whole point of this album. The album really has this balance of dark and light. Some songs feel good, some are dark, and some are in-between, but they all have a vibe of their own. They’re really specific in the vibes of the records.”
Read the full track-by-track breakdown of Radioactive over at Complex.
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