Drake's favorite collaborators are ghosts



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It is unclear how, exactly, Drake has succeeded. On "Do not Matter To Me", a song late on the last album of the rapper Scorpion he recruits Michael Jackson for a duet. The late King of Pop is listed as a feature, and true to this billing, his voice handles the chorus duties on a smoldering pace that's tailor-made for a Drake song titled "Do not Matter To Me."

He declined to comment on how his voice came to Scorpion but the sampling of his voice is not totally unknown. The great teacher toppled "human nature" for the Nas classic Illmatic cut "it's not hard to say", in 1994, establishing the movement as a flag in the ground. Since then, Jackson sampling is designed to show that you are at the top of your game, a flex by publishing the rate.

Just sampling Jackson, however, was not enough for Drake. Instead, he discovered an unpublished song (or, just as likely, an unfinished chorus), got permission from Jackson's estate and built a song around him. "Do not Matter To Me" opens like most of Drake's songs, with lugubrious atmospheric synths and Drake gently singing to an ex-lover. Then Jackson enters; Even with a digital thrill added to his voice, he is unmistakable. While billing "starring Michael Jackson" would feel like a useless flourish in almost every scenario, it's close to winning here.

This retroactive style of collaboration with Jackson's already occurred, when Justin Timberlake – another apparent heir to the pop king – played with him on "Love Never Felt So Good," a single from the band. posthumous album of Jackson in 1945 Xscape . In this case, however, Timberlake was invited and inserted into a Jackson album, not the other way around. Drake created the song in a similar way, but "Do not Matter To Me" is quite his.

Just a piece later, Drake repeats the feat, this time placing Static Major – the influential songwriter of "Pony" by Ginuwine and "Lollipop" by Lil Wayne – alongside the Man of Ty Dolla Sign on "After Dark". This means that among the four characteristics enumerated on Scorpion (there are others that are more subtle, and not listed), half are posthumous appearances. It's a movement that attracts attention and is in tune with Drake's entire career.

This is not the first time Drake unearthed Static Major material: The singer, a tragically talented figure of modern R & B, also arose in the form of a sample on "Look" What You Done, "the touching ode of Drake. to his family from 2011 Take Care . The sample does not come from a recorded song, but from a Static YouTube clip repeating in an echo room, accompanied only by a piano, that producer Chase N Cashe discovered and chopped before 40 built it in its final version.

Five Years Later, Views Drake has dug a verse Pimp C unpublished for the title "Faithful". Rapper UGK died in 2007, but left behind music. One of his unpublished verses made his way to Drake, whose passion for all things Houston gives some credence to the movement; Drake takes the trouble to find samples that no one else possesses and weaves them into songs to make them feel like traits – collaborations even

Drake is the most persistent, the deepest. felt a musical relationship outside of his closest collaborators is his relationship with Aaliyah. Aaliyah, a Drake sample, has a tattoo of Aaliyah, interpolated Aaliyah on Scorpion and embarked on the production of an unfortunate album of unpublished material. , Aaliyah.

All that to say: Drake really likes working with artists who are no longer there. The rappers deploy samples of dead artists all the time. The way Drake does it is different. He takes the trouble to find samples that no one else has, and weaves them into songs to make them look like features – even collaborations – rather than a simple clip used to create a beat

A cynical reading of this is that it shows off its influence (and its bank account); these artists are hard to reach, and Drake likes to flex. Kanye West has recounted being the next Michael Jackson for a decade, but it is more difficult to get his legacy on your side. Of course, this is not all that happens here. The artists chosen by Drake appear to be the artist with whom he sincerely believes that he would work had he been born at another time.

Getting an artist like Jackson, or Aaliyah, or Static Major, or Pimp C on a song works like a single prestige movement. He gives an immediate sense of sadness to the proceedings – a quality Drake award in much of his music – but he also links Drake to a broader historical legacy (in rap, lend a feature to someone's as strong as possible). By including these voices in his own catalog, he influences the way we talk about him when he is not in conversation.

In the curious case of "Do not count me", the trend is more than ever bent today. To listen to it, the song does not sound like Drake found an unpublished song from Michael Jackson and made it work for his purposes. It looks like Drake has written a hook for Michael Jackson to sing. The effect is strange, closer to Drake cosigning the biggest pop star to live rather than the opposite. Everything is strange when you play with death.

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