Since forever, but especially in the late 2000s, good things just happened to you if you were a light-skinned dude. Not much else really explains how Tyga got on. In 2007, he made a little noise as an LA-area teen with his debut mixtape, Young on Probation, which had “Fuck Em,” a buzzy hyphy cut mostly about fucking girls in the butt.

Somehow, that found the ears of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz, who was building a new imprint called Decaydance. Ol’ Pete was a big-time Lil Wayne head like a lot of people who were alive at the time. Of course, he couldn’t sign Wayne, but he figured Tyga was the next best thing. Tyga later joked, “He wanted to sign me just ’cause I had a lot of tattoos like Lil Wayne.”

Well, Tyga kept on hustling his way upward, becoming something of a thirst-trapping hip-hop Forrest Gump. He teamed up with Warped Tour’s resident rap-rocker Travie McCoy—another Pete Wentz co-signed tatted-up lightskin—for “Coconut Juice,” a bubbly teen jungle-juice-chugging anthem produced by the guys who would go on to do Metro Station’s “Shake It.” Sometimes I’d blast “Coconut Juice” on my walks to middle school.

Around the same time, and through Wentz, Tyga met and exchanged numbers with Lil Wayne at the MTV VMAs. For a while, Weezy ghosted his texts, but soon he invited Tyga down to Atlanta to hang out as he was building momentum for the soon-to-be pop culture behemoth Tha Carter III. Tyga was right there when Wayne made “A Milli,” even spitting a verse that, for the good of planet Earth, stayed on the engineer’s hard drive.

Then when Wayne cemented himself as a rap God, he handed Tyga a spot in his Young Money clique. That would give Tyga a significant attention boost, but he was stuck behind a more powerful light-skinned rapper: Drake. It was a blessing in disguise, though, because Tyga wasn’t meant to be the man; he began to figure out that his true path forward was to be a human incubator for rap trends.

Meanwhile, in LA, Tyga was a regular at jerk parties: High school-aged crews with popping Myspace accounts battling each other with loose-limbed dance moves and stripped-down slappers. Real hip-hop! The craze was in full swing. There, he met YG and DJ Mustard, who were running the local party scene. Naturally, the jerk sound worked its way into Tyga’s 2010 joint mixtape Fan of a Fan with Chris Brown: the weightless drum bonks of “Drop Top Girl,” the beatboxing rhythm of “G Shit,” snapbacks that seemed like they were stapled to their heads. The next year Tyga and CB popped up on the Mustard-produced slow-bop “Hell Yeah” off YG’s good-ass-time mixtape Just Re’d Up, coincidentally the same tape that you could argue was the liftoff of Mustard’s LA ratchet movement.

Mustard’s ratchet sound grew out of jerk into its own winning production formula by tweezing in elements of hyphy’s energy (think Traxamillion’s “Superhyphy”), 2000s Atlanta club rap’s minimalism (Mr. Collipark beats come to mind), and Baton Rouge jig’s twerk bounce à la Boosie’s “Do Tha Ratchet,” a huge spiritual influence. Emerging at the perfect time before the rise of drill and coinciding with a boom in feel-good EDM, ratchet beats over the next several years became inescapable. For real: You couldn’t turn on the radio or go to a party without hearing “Mustard on the beat, ho,” which might be the defining words of the late-Obama era.

None of it would have been possible without Tyga and Mustard’s “Rack City,” one of the great, big, dumb, club-rap hits of the 2010s. Released in 2011, it was the first mega-hit of the LA ratchet age. Initially, Mustard made the beat for his main man, YG, but he passed, so on went the iconic West Coast instrumental to Tyga. Shit like this just happened to Tyga. Mustard made a lot of beats similar to “Rack City,” but very few of them were as spare and skeletal. “When he first sent me the beat to ‘Rack City,’ I thought he was just playing at first,” Tyga said in a 2014 interview. “I was like, ‘Where’s the rest of the beat?’ I’d never heard a beat so empty. ”

That’s the magic. The finger snaps are so hard they’re inhuman. His crunk-ish “Hey!” sample loops hypnotically. Kinetic twerk claps meet that synthy bassline, which locks the track into a groove almost like a never-ending house mix. When I hear the rhythm, I get flashbacks. Getting drunk for the first time with my friends. Getting jealous of kids whose parents bought them Tisa snapbacks and sleeveless denim vests. Butchering the slit I tried to cut into my eyebrows with my dad’s razor. Mustard made a lot of beats that are hard to tell apart—“Rack City” isn’t one of them.

And oh, Tyga. It’s the best he ever sounded when giving out money-burning strip club commands. He had tried this earlier with the Lex Luger-produced “Lapdance,” but he bit Rick Ross and Juicy J too hard. On “Rack City,” his laid-back flow falls somewhere between Travis Porter and Keak Da Sneak, yet his nasal, almost moaning chants kind of become their own thing. It’s so much fun to imitate the smirking deadpan of “Got your grandma on my dick,” to pull at your collar and do a little Mac Dre mean mug when the handclaps go bonkers as he delivers, “Got my shirt off, the club too packed,” as if you’re getting his live stream of feeling-myself thoughts from the sickest party ever.

The masterstroke of the hook, too, is that Tyga is really good at saying “Bitch.” Not quite Too $hort good, but he’s up there. Listen to the clean radio edit, then listen to the original: It’s like two different songs. Sure, “Rack City” is probably the DJ Mustard beat—up there for me with the slinky snap&B of Tinashe’s “2 On” and the tripped-out, post-Dream pussy-addict stuff he made with Teeflii—but I always come away thinking about Tyga. That might be wrong. Call it light-skinned privilege, if you will. But for someone who has survived the constantly shifting terrains of hip-hop like a roach, who became a longtime maker of cursed hits by attaching himself to whatever he deemed was cool, it’s worth remembering the true miracle of “Rack City”: the one time Tyga wasn’t the death knell of a trend but the catalyst.