“Whatever happened to Rich Homie Quan?”

“Where did he go?”

“Did he fall off?”

These are questions that Rich Homie Quan’s fans and Atlanta teens have been asking since 2015. After releasing his double-platinum and highest charting single “Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh),” he just stopped making music. Fans would see Quan on Instagram posting pictures, hyping everybody up thinking he about to drop some music or a mixtape, but still, nothing came until April 2017 when he dropped his new mixtape “Back to the Basics.”

We later found the music drought came because he was going through a legal battle with his former record label Think It’s A Game Entertainment (T.I.G.). In August 2015, the Atlanta rapper sued the label for $2 million in unpaid royalties he claimed were stolen from him. T.I.G. responded by countersuing him for breach of contract and requesting an injunction to prevent him from releasing any more new music with another label. Since he couldn’t drop any music while he was going through the litigation with T.I.G., people were saying Quan fell off.

When asked what was going through his head when people were saying he fell off, Quan tells VOX in a phone interview, “It really wasn’t the people’s business for me to respond to them, I just had to find what I love doing and that was just getting back to dropping music.”

We also talked to Nadine Graham a freelance music journalist who has covered Rich Homie Quan since the start of his career and asked her does she think Quan fell off while he was going through the litigation with T.I.G. Graham said, “I don’t think he fell off necessarily, a lot of people think he did though…because he wasn’t around, he did kind of had to sit down for a second. But the ‘Back to The Basics’ project was supposed the thing that got the wheels turning again.”

For his successful run with T.I.G., Quan states he was “eating but wasn’t grubbing,” but there is no bad blood between each other now that the lawsuit was settled out of court. Rich Homie Quan is now with Motown Records and is working on his debut album “Rich as in Spirit.” He says he’s tracing back his roots, trying to return to the “old Quan.” The Quan people fell in love with on mixtapes like “I Promise I Will Never Stop Going In”  and “Still Goin In: Reloaded” back in 2013.

When Quan first came out, teens loved him because most of his music is relatable to real life situations. Especially on songs like “They Don’t Know” when he said: “They don’t know, what I’ve been through, they don’t know the half, they only know that I tell them.” Those lyrics touched me just because people don’t know your everyday life, they just know about the stuff you tell them. You’re the only person who knows what you’re going through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nwni1gFQG0

On  “Hold On,” from the same mixtape, he said:

“I done lost a couple of partners, When I thought s**t couldn’t go wrong, (but it did)/Can I get a witness cause everybody got problems and you don’t know where to go… and when it feels like you done lost everything, Ay you gotta hold on, hold on, hold on…”

When you hear it, you can just feel the pain the in in his voice, like you can feel what he’s been through and his struggle. Songs like this especially resonated with Atlanta youth going through the same things.

Says Quan: “I know I had a big impact on the youth when I first came out, now I try to watch what I say cause I know a lot of eyes be on me because the kids, man, they the future, I’m just glad God gave me this opportunity to have such an impact on the kids.”

Quan’s fashion sense also had an impact on Atlanta youth. Atlanta wasn’t wearing tight-fitting clothes before Rich Homie and his former Rich Gang partner Young Thug made the style hot in 2014. Quan also had teen boys all over the city rocking afros with the hair twisted and napped up, better known as the “Rich Homie cut.”

Then, in 2015, Quan braided his hair, dyed it red and came with the dance that was trending the whole year, “The Quan dance.”

The dance was kind of funny to some people but some of Quan’s old fans were noticing a change. He wasn’t the same Quan that first came out with “Still Goin In.” He was making music hardly anyone could relate to or understand what he was saying. Rich Homie dropped a mixtape “If You Ever Think I Will Stop Going In Ask RR” back in 2015 and you could hear he wasn’t the same Quan. The first couple of tracks had some heat, but toward the middle and the end it wasn’t so hot. It sounded like he was trying to sing but he was mumbling at the same time. You can tell he was just throwing words around.

“The way I started to hear beats changed,” admits Quan. “Like, it didn’t feel the same it didn’t feel genuine no more. It [started] as a hobby and now going on as a job.”

In February 2016, Quan appeared on British radio station Capital Xtra as a guest on Tim Westwood’s show. Westwood has interviewed popular rappers like Eminem, Rae Sremmurd and Migos and has had them spit freestyles that he uploads to Youtube. Rich Homie appeared on his radio station and he did a 16-minute freestyle over the instrumentals to Bryson Tiller’s “Exchange,” Gucci Mane’s “I Might Be,” Tupac’s “Ambitionz Az A Ridah,” and Nas’ “If I Ruled the World.”

His freestyle was so horrible that the comments got disabled under the video because they were clowning him. That same year Quan appeared as Lil Kim’s guest on VH1’s Hip-Hop Honors show where he was supposed to perform The Notorious B.I.G.’s verse on “Get Money.” But when he was performing, he forgot the lyrics. Social media was blowing up about the performance saying, “Quan is the donkey of the day.”  Quan’s popularity was decreasing drastically. He needed a change.

Quan tells VOX: “It wasn’t even so much of a change, it was just like me being able to talk with myself and just telling myself ‘Man, you gotta go back to doing you, you gotta go back to doing what makes you feel happy and doing what you love.’”

After taking a few more months off, Quan cut off his red hair and got back in the studio. In late February 2017, Quan announced that he signed with Motown Records and then dropped his “comeback” mixtape “Back To The Basics” in April. Within the first week of release, the mixtape garnered over 2,000,000 streams on MyMixtapez.

On the intro track “Never Made It,” Quan addresses people who said he fell off with lines like, “Never thought these folks would turn their back on me thought they was fans…” Then on “Replay” he calls out all of the copycats that emerged during his hiatus with lines like, “Since I cut my hair I feel like everybody Quan.” On “Str8,” he talks directly to his fans with lines like, “They say I changed, but I feel like I’m still the same Quan.”

“That was one of his best projects,” says Hot 107.9 Atlanta radio personality B. High, who has interviewed Quan numerous times throughout his career. “You can kind of tell he did go all the way back to the basics because the music on that tape, I think it was some of the best music he dropped in a while.”

Rich Homie doesn’t have an official release date for “Rich As In Spirit” but he calls it a “beautiful masterpiece” and says he put his heart into it. He also promises that it returns to his the storytelling roots of the old Quan. “Rich As In Spirit” has the potential to be Quan’s comeback album because you can already tell he is going to have so much to say. But Nadine Graham has a point when she tells VOX that Quan is going to need a really big hit to compete with new rappers who have emerged during his time away. 

“Things move so fast,” says Graham, mentioning the emergence of new rappers like XXXtenaction and Moneybagyo. “In this industry there’s a new song out every week. So now you have to put forth the effort, people are going to laugh at you if you come out and the s**t is wack.”

You can tell Rich Homie Quan is trying to go back to the “old Quan.” He’s cut off his dreads and has that “Rich Homie cut” again. But he can’t go back to the 23-year old who was struggling and living with his mom. He needs to move on from that but still keep doing the storytelling his fans love. If he sticks to that, “Rich As in Spirit” is going to put him back in the music scene.

“I pray they rock with my wave,” says Quan to his young fans waiting for him bounce back. “Not just because I’m trying to spread a positive message, but because I’m staying true to me. I’m not trying to do what everybody else is doing. I’m trying to do the storytelling and motivational music. I just want to inspire. I don’t want to change, I just want to be Quan.”

The say you fall off when they don't know your story!!! What god gave me could never fall off!!! Pay close attention #RichAsInSpirit

— RICH HOMIE BABY! (@RichHomieQuan) September 12, 2017

Calvin, 15, is homeschooled and writes music in his free time.

Photo: RichHomieQuan.com