I got nothing this week. So: an apropos-of-nothing, RapGenius-style breakdown of Drake’s guest verse on the Weeknd’s “The Zone.”
Whoa…All these broken hearts on that pole/ Man, if pole dancin’s an art, you know how many f****n’ artists I know?
A pretty “meh” start. No one ever said pole dancing was an art; stripped of that conceit, he’s saying he knows a lot of strippers, nothing more. And the choice of modifier is just weak syllabic place-holding. Drake in a strip club is a funny image; you can imagine him trying to convince a dancer that she deserves better, while Rick Ross throws dollar bills at her like bread crumbs at a pigeon.
Got some new bills in the mail, got some big favors I owe/ Got some good things ahead of me when these bad b*****s let go/ Girl let’s go.
For a guy with such a contrived career path, he’s got an amazingly natural cadence as a rapper. But keep that “big favors” line in mind.
Walk your broken heart through that door/ Sit your sexy a** on that couch/ Wipe that lipstick off of your mouth/ I take it slow.
Our second “broken heart” reference. They do call him Heartbreak Drake, after all. (NB: In case he ever gets chubby, lots of foods rhyme with Drake—clambake Drake, birthday cake Drake, etc.)
She in love with my crew/ She said make enough so I can try some, I thought takin’ drugs just ain’t you, be you/ Yeah girl, just be you.
Here he’s referring to “sizzurp,” a promethazine-codeine/Sprite concoction and well-known Southern rap signifier. Drake’s taunting his girl for seeking his approval; she’s indicated she doesn’t like to take drugs, but succumbed to implicit peer pressure the moment Drizzy started to lean. Drake seems like kind of an a**hole.
And I do this s**t for my hometown, it been goin’ down, it ain’t new/ That’s that north-north, that up top, that OVO and that XO.
Canadian swag! Drizzy is from Toronto, which isn’t known as a hip-hop hotbed (though the Weeknd also hails from, ahem, that north-north), and was born in October (hence OVO, or October’s Very Own). Neither of these things are particularly cool, in and of themselves, but then again, neither is Degrassi: The Next Generation.
Your girlfriend at our next show, but it’s all good, don’t stress though/ First night f**k, never really planned it/ Take a deep breath, no one need to panic/ Lips so French, a** so Spanish/ You don’t really like attention? I don’t know if she gon’ manage out here.
This is Drake in a nutshell. The first three lines are confused and contradictory, and whether he fucked your girlfriend remains subject to some debate. But the last pair hit on all cylinders—an effortless double-time flow, alternating conversation and meta-conversation (notice the change in subject from second to third person), taking his own stardom as a given. Which, after all, is both the principal criticism and compliment to be made of Drake.
But she got me all up in my zone, said she like the view I got in this place/ S**t, I did all of that on my own, aw yeah.
So, maybe he doesn’t have big favors he owes. Maybe he does. At this point, it doesn’t matter: dude’s remarkably fresh, living in a glass house but somehow impervious to thrown stones, even when spitting a mouthful of non-sequiturs.
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