In March 2012, U.K.-based music website Sound on Sound published a profile of Noah "40" Shebib, the OVO Sound guru who has produced most of Drake's music since So Far Gone in 2009. Among several questions about 40's favored equipment and production techniques, the journalist Paul Tingen asked 40 to break down something that, three years later, would become a flashpoint of discussion within hip-hop—Drake's songwriting process.
"In hip-hop," 40 explained, "you must write your own raps. If someone else were to write them for you, you'd have no credibility whatsoever, and you'd be out of the window immediately."
"But when it comes to the music," 40 continued, "there's not really the same pride in writing it yourself. People don't care who wrote it, or where it comes from or what the sample is, they just want the hottest beat. They just want that and then put it out in their own song. Having said that, Drake and I do take pride in writing songs together, just the two of us."
Given Meek Mill's recent accusation that Drake employs ghostwriters—and given 40's having vehemently countered those accusations—the values and outlook that 40 shared in that 2012 profile are now more interesting than ever.
In his interview with 40, Tingen is specifically concerned with the construction of Drake's 2011 hit single "Headlines," a song produced by Boi-1da and 40 with uncredited assistance from Hush. Before the success of "Headlines" and Take Care, Drake had sold a more than a million copies of Thank Me Later. And since "Headlines," Drake has sold additional millions of records as a genre-bending hit factory that's churned out four best-selling albums and a couple dozen hit solo records, never mind his many successful guest verses. In the past three years, Drake's pop cultural appeal has expanded, and 40 has amended his respect for hip-hop accordingly.
Commercial performance aside, "Headlines" also marked the controversial ratcheting up of the sanitized, so-called soft mafioso persona that persists in Drake's latest music. "Headlines" is when Drake, now an avowed boss and body-snatcher, stressed the bounds of his previously suburban reality.
We've examined this controversy’s implications for hip-hop authenticity elsewhere. What I mean to focus on here, however, is the defensive rationalization that seems to have Noah “40” Shebib at odds with his only slightly younger self. Last week, in response to Meek Mill and the general controversy that he provoked, 40 defended Drake in the following terms, via Twitter:
Rap has a stigma about writing your own lyrics and rightfully so... its a very personal art form and its rooted in speaking truthfully.
We go beyond the normal boundaries that rappers want to sleep themselves stuck in.
We've been fighting those rules from day one. If no one noticed there weren't many singing rappers in '08
What's striking here is that in the 2012 interview 40 speaks of singular authorship as an esteemed honor code; whereas now, in his tweets, 40 seems to regard that honor code with contempt. Maybe it's the royalties and world tour revenue speaking, or else it's sincere, hard-fought musical growth; conceivably, it's both. With no platinum plaques on my wall, just a love for the music, I myself have wavered in the appreciation of hip-hop exceptionalism and singular authorship, on the one hand, and collaborative musicianship as a challenge to all that.
At an agnostic extreme, Fader editor-in-chief Naomi Zeichner has argued that "the walls between the street and the Internet, the underground and the mainstream, and different genres have vaporized," and that hip-hop's founding authorship principles have gone the way of the samurai. Q-Tip had preempted this argument by a quarter century, and now, at Noisey (andonTwitter), music critic Craig Jenkins has insisted, "you can have help with your writing, but [then] you can’t go beating your chest about your pen game."
On the outskirts of that back-and-forth, on Twitter, I read certain, marginalized disgust with the celebration of Drake as the winner against Meek Mill, a yeoman street rapper who, if you let the haters tell it, Drake somehow defeated with boredom and appropriated memes. This rap fan tweeted, "I ain't spend nights in jails listening to Mobb Deep for this."
Drake has built an awesome pop catalog on the strength of his own pen, 40’s production, and with songwriting contributions from Nickelus F, Kenza Samir, Quentin Miller, Hush, and others. Presumably, 40 believes Drake's hip-hop credibility to be fully intact, despite the parameters of his earlier outlook, which might've resolved that Drake has "no credibility whatsoever" once presented with this batch of reference tracks, rumors, and hat-tips from the Boy himself.
"It’s cool to get another creative mind in there," Drake told Vibe a year ago, referring to credited "Connect" co-writer Kenza Samir. "Just someone who’s thinking solely about the words and not the melodies and placement. It’s nice to read her poetry sometimes—I’ll take from that."
By the sound of it, it's not just Drake and 40 anymore.
Justin Charity is a staff writer for Complex. Follow him @BrotherNumpsa.
