His quest is to be timeless through lyrics universally applicable enough to border on cliches, in a good way. I wanted to take it off my album because I was like, ‘I shut ‘em down, Onyx.’ I hate the fact that that rhyme is still in there,” Drake said in June 2010 interview.Įven though it’s the least-Drake album, it’s still a Drake album. “I never want to use that flow in life again. Less than two weeks after Thank Me Later was released, Drake was already trying to distance himself from core parts of the album’s appeal.
So, “I’m hot like the sun” becomes “I’m hot, the sun.” The pause often places an undue amount of profundity on one word resulting in unintentionally hilarious punchlines like “It’s going down, basement” and “It’s a parade, Macy’s” because it seemed like every rapper in 2010 was rapping like Big Sean. The supa dupa flow, credited to Big Sean as the inventor by Drake himself, is essentially a simile with a pause where a “like” should be. It was really kind of about, ‘How big can we look?'”Īnother one of the more obvious signifiers of Thank Me Later is the preponderance of the ‘supa dupa flow’ over any other rapping style. “It was definitely, probably the one project that maybe had the least personal touches. “That was probably the only one of my albums that was remotely influenced by where I was at in my career at the time,” Drake said in a December 2019 interview on Rap Radar. Drake admits Thank Me Later is the only album of his created from expectations. By this point, you would expect the most popular rapper in the world to sound like an R&B artist for a considerable amount of any album he releases. The first four tracks of his most successful album, 2016’s six-time-platinum Views, has as many only-singing songs in its first four tracks. That’s practically unheard of for more than half of the Canadian’s genre-defying career. Outside of “Cece Interlude” and “Find Your Love,” two of the last three songs on the album, Drake’s 14-track debut didn’t have any other songs featuring him only singing. Nothing about Thank Me Later is as glaringly different than nearly every Drake album as the imbalance between singing and rapping. The then-23-year-old newcomer didn’t have that experience or confidence in his talents and succumbed to the piercing criticisms as an emotional artist who sang enough for his rapping abilities to be questioned. “It’s just really trying to tell the greatest story that’s never been told, which is the story of a rapper’s come-up, and tell it without being corny or over-bragging or sounding like, ‘Feel sorry for me.’ It’s going to be a very interesting record because I’m really going to have to dig deep and tell stories that people can relate to,” Drake told MTV in October 2009.ĭrake wanted to be everything to everyone, a trait he’s refined through the years into an internal homing device enabling him to precisely tap into what makes a hit in different genres.