The legendary rapper Drake called “corny”
Drake, on several occasions through the years, has been at pains to express his admiration for Jay-Z. But there’s a competitive streak in the Canadian that often seeps into his words of respect for Jay.
Even when he’s heaping praise on his contemporary, there are moments where Drake can’t quite keep things entirely cordial.
In 2014, Drake began to become irked by a trend he was observing within rap at the time: frequent references to the art world. It had started to really annoy him, and chief among those guilty for doing it was Jay-Z, whose track ‘Picasso Baby,’ released the previous year, was filled with mentions of famous artists. Not a fan of this tendency, Drake expressed his frustration with it to Rolling Stone.
“It’s like Hov can’t drop bars these days without at least four art references!” he complained. “I would love to collect at some point, but I think the whole rap/art world thing is getting kind of corny.”
Those are strong words, but, in that same interview, Drake made it very clear that he still loved Jay-Z, specifically citing the track ‘N***** in Paris,’ which Jay had made with Kanye West, as an especially brilliant piece of music. He admitted to feeling “physically sick” when he first heard it, not because it was bad, but because it was so good that he wished he’d come up with it. “I was like, ‘How did I not think of that?’ — ‘Ball so hard, that shit cray!’” he said. “It was real rap shit, but it felt melodic; all the cadences felt so good.” Drake actually loved the song so much that he wrote ‘Started From the Bottom,’ which self-consciously tried to match the catchiness of the rapped hook in Jay and Kanye’s song.
This business of Drake expressing both love for and frustration with Jay-Z within a single interview is not unique. He’s done it before, like when Jay-Z won a Grammy in 2010 for his track ‘D.O.A. (Death Of Auto-Tune).’ Drake, who’d been nominated for ‘Best I Ever Had,’ was of the opinion that he, in fact, should have been the one to take home the award, but he was careful, as always, not to step on Jay’s toes too much.
“I’ve always been fascinated with the Grammys, so I don’t mean disrespect when I say this, but I’ve kind of given up on them,” he moaned to Billboard in 2011. “… the one that really got to me was when I lost to ‘D.O.A.’ for ‘Best I Ever Had.’ That one to me was, like, really? Not to say that Jay-Z isn’t the most incredible rapper and that ‘D.O.A.’ wasn’t a good song. I just felt like they had an option to give me a Grammy for a mixtape, and they just didn’t do it [laughs]. Because it goes against the grain of everything that is traditional.”
It’s the same sort of thing in both instances. Drake, be it with regard to his Grammy loss to Jay-Z, or when expressing his frustration with Jay’s art references in ‘Picasso Baby,’ disses him in the lightest possible way, but always makes sure to praise him, too. Perhaps this is a tendency we’ll see again in future?