Drake comes clean about his son on the sprawling new Scorpion
Drake’s always been good at controlling the narrative around him, alternately leaning into his corniness and his penchant for drama, aligning himself with other emcees and labels as best fits the landscape. But his narrative was ripped out of his hands when Pusha T released the withering “Story Of Adidon,” a scorched-earth diss track that most notably called the rapper out for having secretly fathered a child. “You are hiding a child, let that boy come home,” Pusha rapped, “Deadbeat mothafucka playin’ border patrol.” Then he made fun of Drake’s longtime producer, Noah “40" Shebib, for having multiple sclerosis. It was some brutal shit.
Drake responded only to the damning photos Pusha published alongside the track, which featured the rapper in blackface, and he did that not via response track but Instagram post. A few days later, it became clear that no musical response was forthcoming. Kanye—sort of stuck in the middle here, having produced the Pusha track that started all of this, but also having long relied on Drake’s lyrical and melodic help—tweeted it was over. Behind-the-scenes hip-hop impresario J Prince told a radio station that he had quietly reached out to Drake and told him to squash the beef. Pusha declared it was time to go “back to the music.”
But, of course, the release of Drake’s new Scorpion was always on the horizon, and he’s aware that he wasn’t releasing the record into a vacuum. It finally came out last night, and on it, the rapper addresses fatherhood and the Pusha beef multiple times. The first comes a few tracks in, on “Emotionless”:
I wasn’t hidin’ my kid from the world
I was hidin’ the world from my kid
From empty souls who just wake up and looked to debate
Until you starin’ at your seed, you can never relate
Breakin’ news in my life, I don’t run to the blogs
The only ones I wanna tell are the ones I can call
They always ask, “Why let the story run if it’s false?”
You know a wise man once said nothin’ at all
Which is some semantic-ass shit, but at least he’s coming out with it. He wraps it in breezily on the later “8 Out Of 10,” which responds to both Pusha and Kanye, saying, “The only deadbeats is whatever beats I been rappin’ to.” Later on the same track he takes a swipe at Kanye’s string of seven-track LPs, saying, “All sevens, no sixes, rest easy, get some shut eye.”