Ricardo Lamarre, known professionally as Rico Beats, is an American record executive, record producer, and songwriter. His most notable production credits are DJ Khaled's "Take That Off", Nicki Minaj's "Roman Reloaded", Soulja Boy's "Mean Mug", Iggy Azalea's "Comme Des Garcons" and Pusha T's "Exodus 23:1". He perviously co-managed the late American rapper Pop Smoke with American record executive Steven Victor.
Career
In 2004, Rico decided he wanted to be a record producer when he was in college. Once he heard Needlz produce "Bang Bang" by Young Buck so he started following his work, and it turned out that they had a mutual friend, so he was introduced and it went from there. He really admired Needlz and bought the same equipment as him so that he could recreate his sound as best he could. Rico started using Needlz was using Logic at the time, and he saw his success with that but felt like it took too long to make a beat on there, so decided that he'd rather do his own thing with Ableton. He got into using Abelton because most people were using Fruity Loops and Logic Pro, so he started messing with Ableton to stand out and be different. In 2010, he produced the song "Mean Thug" on Soulja Boy's album The DeAndre Way. Rico wanted to work on Nicki Minaj's first album, Pink Friday beat he missed out because he was working with Soulja Boy at the time. Nicki's manager, Safaree Samuels called Rico to send some beats when they started working on Nicki's second album . He didn't have any beats at the time he called, so he made fifty beats within the next month and "Roman Reloaded" was the one Nicki ended up keeping. In January 2012, Rico was working in a studio in Los Angeles, trying to get more music on her album. She went there and played a snippet of "Roman Reloaded", but it wasn't finished yet. The full version of the song was released on February 24. In 2013, Rico produced Pusha T's controversial "Exodus 23:1" which was diss to Drake. Lil Wayne was not too happy with the diss, yet his name never came up during the recording process. Rico told MTV News that the Young Money label was the last thing on their minds. He said, "Honestly, when we were in the room listening to that record, I didn't hear none of these guys' names brought up. It was none of that. Dream got in his zone and he went in the booth. Pusha got his pen, like I didn't hear nobody mentioned. Pusha kept tellin' me, I need something dark, man. The album sounds crazy, but I still need somethin' for my fans. So I was like, 'I got you, give me by six o' clock,' I went down to the studio and I was just listening to Biggie. I was just playin' pure Biggie. Rico has already produced two tracks for Jadakiss's next album and one of them is going to feature rapper Jeezy. Rico is also working with Sean Kingston, Fabolous, Jay Z, and Jennifer Lopez just picked out one of his beats to use, but doesn't really know what to do with it yet.
While Rico, The Dream, and Pusha T were in Miami working on a bunch of songs, "Millions", which was originally produced by Southside, was played and Kanye West didn't like how the record was sounding. He wanted the drums to knock louder, some extra sounds, and a choir, so he asked Rico to do it. He refused, because he didn't want to work on someone else's beat without their permission, so they tried to reach out to Southside but they couldn't reach him. A year later, Rico's manager kept telling him, "Man, they need you to redo the drums" and Rico said, "Well, why don't you ask Southside. He produced it!" About a week before the song dropped, Rico gets an email from the engineer at the G.O.O.D. Music label who mixed the song, pleading with him to add his signature drums and the choir to it. So at that point, Rico just did it as a favor to Pusha T, because they always had a great relationship and he wanted the record to come out right, not even knowing that he would get credit for it. When the song was released, he found out they had given him credit through Twitter because all of these people were telling him, "Oh, you killed that beat," and he corrected them, but Southside felt a way about that and starting cursing him out on Twitter. They kept going back and forth on Twitter. Southside tweets, "To good musicneed to inform niggas if they gone have niggas fuckin wit yo beats honestly I don't here wat dis guy did". Then Rico fired back with the following tweets, "Fam like I told everyone when they talkin' bout that shit I did redid damn drums and choir that's what they emailed me to do. They been asking me for fucking year to redo ya drums and the choir u had I kept saying no until last week. I don't give fuck bout no production credit on millions G I ain’t chassin' that I ain't ask for no bread or pub. I ain't know niggaz gave me co pub till shit came out so go holla at them niggaz fam I ain't chassin' no mixtape cred". Southside came back and tweeted, "U couldn't redo shit it ain't re done y'all fuck niggas y'all makes a name off niggas like me u didn't ask for it but u took it". Both producers continued lobbing social media grenades until the threats became real when Rico tweeted this, "Nigga shut ya dirty ass up and holla when u see me. I'm hereNY come nigga stop all that tweeting just get down here". Southside fired back with a threat of his own, "I'll have nigga pull up on ur gay ass where Eva u at nigga. Bet say no more nigga". Thankfully, both parties stopped tweeting each other and, presumably, went back to making beats.
