How Blacc Sam & Bino Rideaux Continued Nipsey Hussle’s Marathon With ‘Prolific’: ‘His Music Is Timeless’

Nipsey Hussle once said, “The highest human act is to inspire.” Seven years after his tragic passing, that inspiration refuses to fade.

When fellow South Central rapper Bino Rideaux and Hussle’s older brother and business partner, Blacc Sam (born Samiel Asghedom), pull up to the Billboard office during their NYC press run for Prolific — Hussle’s collab album with Bino and the late rapper’s first posthumous project — they’re rolling 25 people deep: a record that won’t be broken anytime soon when it comes to artist visits.

With a lineup large enough to make up an MLB roster, there’s a certain intentionality in making sure everyone from the All Money In family who had a hand in Nip’s journey was there for the ride, as if a piece of Hussle was carrying on through them too, picking up where the rapper, community leader, innovative entrepreneur and upstanding family man left off.

“Seeing the inspiration and how he inspires so many people, that’s what he wanted to do.

That was really his mission,” Sam tells Billboard.

“He was really happy to give any type of inspiration, and when he saw people use that inspiration, even if it was a little bit of inspiration from him, and succeed, that [thrilled] him.” Hussle took a liking to a neophyte Bino, inviting him to the studio for a mid-2010s session, and the fuse was lit from there.

Prolific , which Hussle has inked on his right temple, came together in 2017 across three straight months of being locked in at the NoName Studios in the Valley’s Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles.

At the time, the building was leased to Ye (formerly Kanye West) and used as a hub for his G.O.O.D.

Music label.

The rap lore of NoName stretches back to the ‘90s when it was home to Death Row Records, where Dr.

Dre and 2Pac made history.

Originally titled Single for the Summer , Bino’s smoky melodies easily mixed with Nip’s spoken wisdom and street savviness to form a potent combination, as they waxed poetic about their romantic escapades and relationship issues, while it was a more experimental Hussle than what was heard on Victory Lap .

“He was prepared to be vulnerable on these records and get out of the norm and just experiment a little bit,” Bino says, adding that Prolific was recorded before their 2017 joint project No Pressure .

“This was the initial idea.