What would Premo say about this today??
“So somebody like Drake, for all the body of work he’s put out, it’s like, we definitely are gonna hold him responsible for having dope rhymes that we consider him writing because when you ask for dope people that you think is hot, I always put Drake in the new generation of rappers that I think are incredible because I look at him as the one that’s writing all his stuff.
So, if it’s where he’s being ghostwritten for, which we can’t prove yet – even though I’ve heard some of the little demos that the other boy did – we don’t know how true that is. He could have just redone it and somebody paid him to put it out there. I don’t know. And I really don’t care. My main thing is, Drake seems like too many of those records he’s done, they seem like he wrote them. They just don’t seem like somebody wrote that many joints for him in his carer.”
“If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but in the hip-hop world, we really, really praise lyricists for what they write and how they spit it. When Rakim writes it and spits it with that attitude; when Ice Cube writes it, KRS-One writes it, Chuck D writes it, and J. Cole writes it, when Jay Z writes it – even if it ain’t on paper – and Biggie, even Pac, Nas, it has to come from you.
Again, we don’t put Dre in that box, but Drake, we do put in that box. Even if the rhyme is weak, we want you to write it. So, if somebody helped him out with the hook, and he laid the hook and sang it, we don’t care about that. But the verses? We want to hear your verse come form your brain, your style, your flow, your attitude because we’ve been putting you way up on the top of the hill because of that greatness you’ve been putting out with all your material.”
“With Drake, he is in a box, unfortunately, that he can’t get out of where it’s like, ‘Yo, that pen better be yours.’ With Meek, I don’t put him in the same lyrical box as Drake. Meek is a street rapper. So I look at him more of a straight hood rapper.
A hood rapper can kick that street talk and makes those types of records. Even though people in the hood like Drake’s records, but Drake is a lyricist. So, let’s hope that all that stuff we’ve been hearing all them years is truly from his pen. If it ain’t, it’s another
Milli Vanilli moment and I hope that’s not the case.”
From Justin Bieber To Drake: A Hip-Hop Icon Tells Us Why It's Important To Write Your Own Raps
at Drake bringing lyricism back