5 Things To Know About April’s BET Amplified Artist HDBeenDope
HDBeenDope is BET’s Amplified Artist for the month of April, so to celebrate, we sat down with the Brooklyn-born rapper to ask him about a myriad of topics.
The “Locked In” artist discussed everything from his inspirations to attending the Roc Nation brunch, and even having his song “Top” featured on Madden 21. Over the past year, the 27-year-old signed to Jay-Z’s label, and overall, has amassed over 20 million YouTube video streams and over 700,000 monthly Spotify listeners.
HD’s newest single release “Locked In” has also experienced viral success, particularly on TikTok where it now has over 8 million streams. The song is off of the rapper’s latest EP project What Can They Say.
Now, HDBeenDope is looking to make 2023 his biggest year yet. Here are 5 things to know about him, from his own words.
Growing up in Flatbush taught him how to hustle
“It brought work into my upbringing,” he told BET. “It’s a lot of Caribbean people, a lot of first generation kids growing up there, and because of that, a lot of the adults, what they instilled in just the culture of that neighborhood is just work.”
The “Paper Planes Freestyle” was created knowing he was signing to Roc Nation
“I [knew] I have to rap in order to announce this because I just assumed a new artist from Brooklyn, just signed to Jay-Z, people want to hear him rap and the way to pay homage to Hov was to sample something from Hov’s catalog that not everyone has sampled,” HD explains. “So I called up [Dizzy Banko] was like, We gotta find a song. And he’s like, ‘What you thinkin?’ ‘What More Can I Say.” So he cooked it up and sent it back to me within a day and it was like, ‘Oh, we got something special.’”
He lost his suit for the Roc Nation Brunch
“It was a crazy thing. I lost my suit for the Roc Nation brunch, I made a record – this is all within 48 hours of the brunch,” HD reveals. “[I] got the suit back and made it to the brunch so it was a wild time.”
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HD’s influences are some of hip-hop’s greatest to ever do it
“When 50 Cent came out, that was the moment I knew I wanted to make music. I just started penning things,” HD says. “And then Lil Wayne came and it was like, alright, this is how you work with similes, this is how you put words together for real. And then [J. Cole], when I found Cole, that was my dive into introspection as an artist.”
Souls of Mischief and Big L also came as later inspirations once he did a deeper dive beyond 50 Cent, Lil Wayne and J. Cole.
One of the biggest moments of HD’s career was landing a big time video game placement
“One of the biggest moments of my career would definitely be landing a placement on Madden 21 because I played that game a lot growing up with my cousins and things like that,” he explains. “So to be able to have a song, like actually playing the game and it’s like, Oh wait, that’s me – that was definitely one of those feelings that was like the child in me couldn’t have predicted.”
