When Drake dropped his last album Scorpion, it came a full month after his beef with Pusha T—and, by extension, Kanye West—exploded. Inevitably, Scorpion was littered with not-so-subliminal disses on songs clearly (and later confirmed as much by Drake) written, recorded and added in response to the situation. By contrast, even though things have once again gotten testy between Drake and West for the better part of the last month, Drake’s new album Certified Lover Boy only has one song that is blatantly full of shots.
On August 20, Drake jabbed at West on Trippie Redd’s “Betrayal.” West responded by sharing a group text thread railing against “nerd ass jocks” coming at him—he added Pusha T to the conversation and many people assumed the name D in the thread was Drake himself. The next night he posted (and later deleted) Drake’s home address in Toronto, Drake seemingly responded by posting video of himself laughing in his car. So the song “7AM On Bridle Path”—which is the Toronto neighborhood where Drake resides—which references tense texts, an address post, and driving with “emotions racing” sure seems to imply he recorded it in response to this latest chapter of their beef, maybe even that very night.
Drake doesn’t name names, but he also doesn’t mince words from the jump. The song starts off with the lines “Secretly beefin me behind closed doors/But playin it peacefully for the streets to see/My n-gga have some decency/Don’t move like a puto.” From there, it’s not hard to read between the lines. “7AM” covers a lot of the same ground Drake typically treads when he goes at Kanye. Drake complains that Kanye tries to move the goalposts— “Lettin’ me take the rap for that Casper the Ghost shit/While you findin’ all of the loopholes” alludes to Pusha’s gripe about Drake’s history of using songwriters, even as West clearly takes all the help he can get when he puts an album together these days. And he thinks that Kanye has lost his grip musically and hates that Drake still has it: “It’s been a lot of years since we seen you comin correct”; “If we talkin top three, then you been slidin’ to third like stolen bases.” Drake sounds positively disgusted at the thought that their album releases could even go head to head with lines like “You over there in denial, we not neck and neck.” He also always makes sure to be dismissive of Kanye’s fashion ambitions (probably because he knows that’s really hitting Kanye where it hurts), here saying “I could give a fuck about who designing your sneakers and tees/Have somebody put you on a Gildan, you play with my seed.” (Gildan tees are the blanks Kanye prints most of his merch on.)
As for evidence that this is a recent track recorded in direct response to Kanye’s latest social media antics, there are allusions to the group chat, specifically Kanye positioning himself as the victim and Drake the bully: “N-ggas textin ‘Bro’ but we are not of no close relation,” and “They tried to label me mean, I say what I mean.” And then Drake goes as far as daring Kanye to actually pull up to Bridle Path: “Give that address to your driver, make it your destination/Instead of just a post out of desperation.” (Justin Laboy, who was cool with Drake before assigning himself to be Kanye’s foremost Donda publicist, also gets a shot for added measure.)
“7AM” is also the fifth song in Drake’s fan-favorite “AM/PM” location series, which he started in 2010 ahead of his first album. The tracks are always moody, ego-driven, hyper-reflective, and most importantly straight bars withouthooks or melodies. This marks the first time he’s used one as an outright diss song, although 2016’s surly “4PM in Calabasas” took aim at Views detractors and had alleged shots for Diddy and Joe Budden as well, while “6PM in New York” had a bar for Tyga during their short-lived beef. (The chest-thumping “5AM in Toronto” is unanimously heralded as the best of the bunch.)
It’s also not the only song on the album that contains aggressive bars towards another rapper. Elsewhere on Certified Lover Boy, Drake appears to reference his less splashy but seemingly just as contentious beef with Swizz Beatz. Last year during an IG live session, Swizz went on a seemingly unprovoked rant against Drake, alluding to a leaked song by Busta Rhymes and Drake and saying “He’s not a bad kid, he’s a good kid. He started from different things, we made a hit record together, it’s all love. I just wanna play music. Because my filter is burnt. Because at the end of the day, n-ggas is pussy for real.”
At one point, Swizz even said “shoot your plane out the sky”—around that time, Drake had been making a big show of unveiling his new private jet designed by Virgil Abloh. Swizz later addressed his comments but didn’t exactly apologize, instead explaining that he was drunk and “Spoke on some things that I definitely shouldn’t have spoke on. Although I may feel a certain way about a certain person, as a G, I’m man enough to say that I did that on the wrong platform.” Drake’s right-hand-man and veritable enforcer Chubbs would later reply to Swizz saying “We don’t need no apology, it’s clear you don’t like us so act that same when you see us, pussy.”
On CLB’s “You Only Live Twice,” Drake raps “Unthinkable when I think of the way these n-ggas been actin’/Yeah I never did nothin’ and you play like we family, huh?/Next thing you wanna shoot me down, it can’t be love/Not sure where you was tryin to send it, it can’t be up/That day you sounded like a bitch, you fancy, huh?”
A couple things here: “Shoot me down” is obviously a direct response to Swizz’s plane comment, and Drake also slickly references “Fancy,” their collaboration from his first album back in 2010. But that’s not the only song from that era he alludes to. It can’t be coincidence that he starts the response off with “Unthinkable,” also the name of the 2009 song Drake wrote for Swizz’s wife, Alicia Keys. The last time Drake brought spouses into a war of words, it landed him in hot water. We’ll see how this one develops, but it wouldn’t be surprising if Pusha T’s next bars for Drake are over a Swizz beat… (It should be noted too that Drake went out of his way to respond to Swizz on a song that features Lil Wayne and Rick Ross, two rappers both are very close with.)
In the interest of counterbalancing all of this negativity though, it should be said that one song on Certified Lover Boy is a token of reconciliation. Drake and Kid Cudi came into the industry around the same time as friends, appearing in this very magazine together as well as each other’s music videos. But by 2016, that relationship soured when Cudi took aim at Drake (ironically, in the midst of his own issues with Kanye, at a time when Drake and Kanye were cool with each other and actually making an album together.) To recap: Cudi tweeted about rappers needing songwriters, Drake dissed him on a song, Cudi tweeted again this time saying “Say it to my face pussy,” Drake responded again on wax daring Cudi to “Come outside” so he could do just that. It’s unclear when they patched things up, or even how, given Drake’s ongoing feud with Kanye and his larger camp, but their new (and first legitimate) collab, “IMY2,” in which Cudi brings Drake into his spacey, vibey sonic realm, is among the early standouts on first-listen of the album.