"Slide" is a song by the American rapper FBG Duck from his sixth mixtape, This How Im Coming 2 (2017). It was originally released as the fourth track from This How Im Coming 2 on December 8, 2017, before getting a re-release as a commercial single on March 28, 2018, through Columbia and RECORDS, following a deal with Sony Music Entertainment. Produced by Greek beatmaker Lil Riico Beatz and written by Weekly alongside Manuel Smart, he recorded the song in 40 minutes, freestyling the lyrics while intoxicated and grieving the death of his brother. Lyrically, he taunts rivals he sees as all talk, warning them not to start something they won't finish.
An official music video, directed by Rickee Arts, was published to YouTube on January 24, 2018. Following the music video's release, "Slide" amassed over eighty-two million views as of 2026. On May 8, 2018, an official remix was released featuring Atlanta-based rapper 21 Savage, who traveled to the studio to record his verse. The song's success led to Weekly signing a deal with RECORDS, a Sony Music Entertainment imprint, and a feature in XXL magazine. The Recording Industry Association of America certified "Slide" gold on January 17, 2023, selling 500,000 certified equivalent units.
The song spread through Chicago's hip-hop scene after its release, prompting a freestyle by a then-fifteen-year-old Kidd Kenn and a remix by Queen Key featuring Chance the Rapper; St. Louis rapper Sexyy Red has said that recording over the "Slide" instrumental in 2018 was the first song she uploaded to YouTube. The song was still being played at Chicago concerts years after Weekly's death, including at Lil Baby's "It's Only Us Tour" stop at the United Center in August 2023. "Slide" received positive reviews from music critics, who praised its production and Weekly's vocal delivery. Critics at Passion of the Weiss, Pitchfork, and the Chicago Reader described it as a standout of the Chicago drill subgenre. It appeared on several year-end lists for 2018, including Spin's 101 Best Songs of the Year, and has since been included in retrospective rankings by Pitchfork, Vulture, XXL, and Cleveland.com as one of the notable songs of Chicago drill. Weekly was fatally shot in Chicago on August 4, 2020, at the age of 26; "Slide" was consistently cited in news of his death as his most known single.
Carlton WeeklyâÂÂwho rapped under the pseudonym FBG DuckâÂÂwas born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, in the Ida B. Wells area. At the age of 17, he formed the hip-hop collective Fly Boy Gang (FBG) alongside Melo and Dutchie, and from 2013 onward released a run of mixtapes, including Look at Me (2013), the two-part How Im Coming series (2016âÂÂ2017), and This How Im Coming 2 (2017). Prior to "Slide", his track "Right Now" reached nearly ten million views online, which he later described as "one of the first big ones for me."
The production came from Lil Riico Beatz, a Greek producer who had grown up in Menidi, a suburb northwest of Athens, before relocating to Stuttgart, Germany. Riico had been sending beat packs to Chicago artists from both Chief Keef's circle and Weekly's camp; he later said Weekly's crew was easier to reach given his smaller profile at the time. Weekly began requesting beats from Riico directly, and chose the instrumental that would become "Slide." After Weekly shot an official video for the track, it drew four million views in its first week.
Weekly recorded "Slide" in forty minutes, freestyling his lyrics. Rather than writing lyrics in advance, he composed and memorized them in the studio, telling VladTV in October 2018, "I just went in that bitch and memorized. I just go with the flow." He recorded the session while grieving the 2017 shooting death of his older brother, Jermaine Robinson, a fellow Chicago rapper who was known as FBG Brick. Reflecting on the session in a June 2018 interview with XXL, Weekly said he was "very intoxicated" and had "lost my brother," adding that he did not expect the song to become a hit.
"Slide" first came out as the fourth track on This How Im Coming 2, hosted by DJ Cortez and released through Spinrilla on December 8, 2017. The official music video, directed by Rickee Arts, was uploaded to YouTube on January 24, 2018, and the track was released as a commercial single on March 28, 2018, via RECORDS, LLC and Columbia Records. The music video for "Slide" was shot in the style of Chicago drill videos of the period, with a bouncing camera tracking a large group of armed men. Alphonse Pierre of Pitchfork praised the video for its "traditional drill video" writing that the visual "could have been recorded in any year throughout the 2010s." By the time of his XXL interview in June 2018, the video had gained twenty-three million views, growing to 40 million by October 2018 and 54 million by August 2020; it surpassed 82 million views by early 2026. The song reached number 8 on Apple Music's United States chart during its commercial run, and the Recording Industry Association of America certified it gold on January 17, 2023, selling 500,000 certified.
On May 8, 2018, an official remix featuring Atlanta rapper 21 Savage was released. Weekly later said he reached out to 21 Savage directly, and during a break from his tour with Post Malone, Savage traveled to a studio in Atlanta to record his verse.
On the remix, 21 Savage backed Weekly's threats by issuing his own warning to rivals, cautioning against mistaking face tattoos for toughness and threatening retaliation at a candlelight vigil. HotNewHipHop's Alex Zidel wrote that 21 Savage's voice was "perfect for the beat." Writing for Complex, Marco Margaritoff noted that 21 Savage delivered what his fans were "clamoring for," with a verse of direct gun talk, citing lines such as "Fuck a fist fight, I'ma show you what these guns do." Hypebeast viewed the feature as a co-sign for Weekly, naming "Slide" as one of the biggest Chicago rap releases of 2018.
"Slide" is a Chicago drill song over a trap beat, running three minutes and fifty-six seconds (3:56). Lil Riico Beatz's instrumental opens on what Tosten Burks, writing for Passion of the Weiss described as applying "to porch-jumping the logic of the drop"âÂÂbuilding from bell tones and hi-hats before the bass drops alongside Weekly's ad-libs. Billboards Nerisha Penrose described the beat as "booming trap," "laced with menacing synths and thick drums."
Weekly opens the song by telling his DJ he does not want Auto-TuneâÂÂBurks noted the disclaimer works both as an aesthetic stance and a targeted diss at rivals in the genre. On "Slide", he favors what Burks described as "animated accents and last-syllable flairs in the tradition of King Louie," moving between "an amused trill and a 'B.O.N.'-style squawk in revolving stretches of rising action (explaining why you won't slide) and climax (what happens when you slide)." Lucas Foster, writing for the same publication in February 2018, called the delivery "melodic yet raspy," over what he called "the gorgeous post-drill beat," while Pitchforks Alphonse Pierre described it as a "sing-song whisper."
Burks wrote that "Slide" "captures the thin line between taunts and attacks," with Weekly addressing rivals he regards as posturing. Penrose described the lyrics as Weekly challenging his foes to back their threats up while keeping his circle small out of distrust. Burks singled out two lines as examples of Weekly's conciseness of threat: "'I can't shake your hand' is a warning; 'Don't wanna hear them loud sounds, then be quiet' is a helpful lesson."
"Slide" drew positive reviews early on, with critics focusing on the production and Weekly's voice. In a February 2018 review for Passion of the Weiss, Lucas Foster called it "drill rap as God intended it to be, gleeful and terrifying," and called Weekly's decision to drop auto-tune a "wise choice," predicting 2018 "will see a lot less of it." The Chicago Readers Leor Galil, in an April 2018 concert preview, called "Slide" "a chilly, menacing local hit." Spin put "Slide" at sixty-ninth on its 101 Best Songs of 2018, a cross-genre list alongside Ariana Grande, Drake, and Travis Scott. That December, Galil wrote that national outlets had mostly ignored the song, yet "Slide" had turned into a "Chicago radio staple" and hit 40 million YouTube views. Tosten Burks, on Passion of the Weisss year-end rap list, ranked it the 26th best rap song of 2018, noting how Weekly's lyrics mix simple taunts with threats.
Music journalists writing in later years put "Slide" as an example when describing late-2010s Chicago drill. Pitchforks Alphonse Pierre Included it on a 2019 list of eleven songs that defined the genre, writing that it was a "reminder that the home of drill will always be Chicago" and that it "arrived at a time when the drill scenes in both the UK and Brooklyn were picking up steam." In 2022, Trey Alston of Vulture said "Slide" helped pull Chicago's local rap scene back after it had cooled off following 2012, describing the lyrics as a "barrage of wide-eyed screams and pleas for his enemies to come see him." Cleveland.com's Troy L. Smith ranked it 24th on a list of the 30 greatest drill tracks ever made, writing that Weekly looked ready to pick up where Chief Keef left offâÂÂthough Smith admitted the violent lyrics were "eerie to listen to" after Weekly was killed in 2020. XXL also included the song in a 2021 roundup of the best drill releases of the previous five years.
Several artists recorded freestyles and remixes over the "Slide" instrumental in 2018. Queen Key, a rapper from Chicago's south suburbs, recorded a remix with an music video that featured a cameo by Chance the Rapper; writing for the Chicago Tribune, Tara Mahadevan described it as one in which "a demure cameo from Chance the Rapper plays second fiddle to Key's charisma." Kidd Kenn, then a fifteen-year-old openly gay rapper from Chicago's East Side, recorded a freestyle over the instrumental that same year, changing the song's opening line from "real nigga party" to "It's a faggot party baby, you cannot get in." Writing for the Chicago Reader, Matt Harvey cited the freestyle as a contribution to Kenn's social media presence and led to a meeting with Def Jam Recordings.
Sexyy Red, a rapper from St. Louis, used the "Slide" instrumental for the first song she uploaded to YouTube in 2018. In a December 2023 interview in XXL, she described how fan requests across social mediaâÂÂ"Everybody would keep writing, 'Send this song, send this song'"âÂÂled to bookings and the start of her music career.
Following the initial success of "Slide," Weekly signed a record deal with the Sony Music Entertainment imprint RECORDS and released the Big Clout extended play. Speaking to VladTV about the signing, he said, "I'm not gonna lie to you, I'm actually happy as hell. I'm proud of myself." He continued putting out singlesâÂÂincluding "Strong," "Terrified," and "Dead Bitches"âÂÂuntil 2020. Weekly was fatally shot in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood on August 4, 2020, at the age of 26. Following his death, news reports cited "Slide" as his most known single.
"Slide" became an established song in Chicago DJ sets in the years following its release. Writing for the Chicago Reader in March 2021, Tara C. Mahadevan named it among the songs that DJs and audiences had been unable to gather around during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, placing it alongside tracks by Chief Keef, King Von, and Lil Durk as part of the city's active club canon. At a Lil Baby concert at the United Center on August 26, 2023âÂÂpart of his "It's Only Us Tour"âÂÂthe house DJ played "Slide" during a between-set interlude of Chicago rap. Writing for The TRiiBE, Jerome "Rome J." Johnson described the moment as one that kept "the crowd energized."
Credits adapted from Apple Music and YouTube.