Certified Lover Boy: Drake takes shots at Kanye West and Swizz Beatz in new album

Canadian rapper, Drake on Friday September 3 dropped his long-awaited album ‘Certified Lover Boy’ less than a week after his rival, Kanye West’s latest album, Donda, was released.

In “7am On Bridle Path”, which is a Toronto neighborhood where Drake resides, the Canadian rapper took shots at Kanye for sharing his home address publicly last month.

On August 20, after Drake took shots at Kanye West on Trippie Redd’s “Betrayal”. The American rapper responded by sharing a group text thread railing against “nerd ass jocks” coming at him.

Kanye 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.

Though no name was mentioned on “7AM On Bridle Path”, a song title which referenced Drake’s Toronto neighborhood, it has been interpreted to be a response to the latest chapter of their beef.

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.”

Drake complained that Kanye tried 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 Kanye 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 also sounded 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 was also dismissive of Kanye’s fashion ambitions (probably because he knows that’s really hitting Kanye where it hurts). He said “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.)

He also accused Kanye of positioning himself as the victim and making him 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.”

The Canadian rapper also dared 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 got a shot for added measure.)

Drake also took shots at Kanye’s claim of being born-again. He said “Told you I’m aimin’ straight for the head. Now they ‘Amen’ and ‘Please’. Trust me, there’s some s*** you really gotta come and see to believe. That’s why your people not believers, they all leavin’ ya. You know the fourth level of jealousy is called ‘Media.'”

“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.)

Certified Lover Boy: Drake takes shots at Kanye West and Swizz Beatz in new album

Drake also took shots at 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”. The comment was made at a time Drake was making a big show of unveiling his new private jet designed by Virgil Abloh. Swizz later addressed his comments but didn’t exactly apologize, he instead explained 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 later replied 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?”

“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.

Drake also served the response to Swizz on a song that features Lil Wayne and Rick Ross, two rappers both are very close with.