GloRilla started slipping into a rut after going a while without dropping new music — fans were clamoring for some more heat, and the Memphis rapper was overthinking how she could outdo herself as her biggest competitor. It knocked her confidence, but only for a moment. On the latest episode of Rolling Stone‘s The Breakdown, GloRilla dives into how she created a hit out of the ultimate reminder that she’s that girl with “Yeah, Glo!”
“I wasn’t the most confident at the time, and I was just overthinking a lot. It was most definitely a confidence booster for myself and me just talking to myself and boosting myself up,” GloRilla explains about the single. “Yeah, Glo!” came together in two parts in the studio, the first day spent on crafting the first half of the song and the second spent on the second verse, which is filled with personal affirmations like: “Stop overthinkin’, these hoes can’t fuck with you / Standin’ on business in these Chanel shoes.”
There’s a science behind making a hit, and GloRilla is studying all the ways to perfect it. “When you have such a good beat, the song just gonna come along. I feel like if you got a good beat, you could damn near say anything on the song gonna be good. But if you got a good beat and lyrics good too? That’s what makes the hit what it is,” GloRilla says. “It was just the chemistry behind the production. And me being from Memphis, that being a Memphis beat — you hear that sample from Da Banggaz’s ‘Run Up Get Done Up.’ Everything was on point.”
Once “Yeah, Glo!” was complete, GloRilla was still mentally tweaking the smallest details, even when everyone around her thought it was perfect. She wanted to push the single to a new level and ultimately shifted the rest of her creative energy towards pairing it with a strong music video.
“Me and [Yo Gotti] came up with the treatment for the video,” the rapper shares. “When I was talking to him about it I’m just like, when I do these videos, I want to talk to a lot of me’s — I want to be talking to myself, you know, older versions of me.” In the clip, she cruises around in a MayBach while taking stock of how far she’s come.
“Some of the things I came up with was real life, like me working in a drive thru,” she notes. “And then when I was giving the money to the girls, I wanted that to happen to me when I was younger. The jail scene, I never really been in jail for a long time. I went to jail for one day. And so that was just something like I thought would be a cool scene.”
After the song dropped, GloRilla noticed fans online putting her verses over legendary hip-hop beats — and they all still sounded like hits. “All of them sound good so the song might just be good and the lyrics just good — the cadence, the flow, it was just 10s across the board,” she says. “The song was for myself and how everybody else took it and made it for them too, they made it 10 times better. The song is full of affirmations for myself, but I’m glad that other people got to be able to make it for them, too.”
