Entertainment

Drake and JLaw: A Match Made in Music Heaven?

by Kadeen Griffiths

Drake meets Lauryn Hill in his latest single "Draft Day", which dropped Tuesday night. The track samples Hill's "Doo-Wop (That Thing)" and features shout outs to athletes and entertainers alike. While there's speculation that "Draft Day"s lyrics contain a diss to rapper Jay Z with the line "You know they love to pop all that shit when I'm not around, but when I'm here, psst, not a sound," the rest of the song feels like a subtle blend of two of his previous songs, "Nothing was the Same" and "The Motto", along with an Eminem-like pop cultural awareness.

He name drops Johnny Manziel and A. Wiggins in the opening hook, the former an American football wunderkind whose face decorates the SoundCloud file and the latter a Canadian college basketball player and favorite for the 2014 NBA draft. Drake then moves on into the meat of the song, dissing Chance the Rapper as the name he would've picked "if I left shit to chance" but smoothing things over in the next line: "no offense, I don't know [him]".

Other references in the song include one to the Jose Canseco steroid scandal of 2005 and to Oakland Athletics, or "Oakland A's" as Drake raps, but the best part of the entire song comes near the end of the verse. Drake gives the Hunger Games a shout out with his promise to "die for [his] district", but Jennifer Lawrence also receives a different kind of shoutout: "You can really get it. I mean, for real, girl, you know I had to do it for you."

Although there's nothing to it considering he and Rihanna are still going strong, it wouldn't be the first time that Drake has given love to a female celebrity on one of his tracks. He used to send shout outs to Nicki Minaj all the time and Rihanna got a possible shout out of her own in Jay Z's verse on "Pound Cake/Paris Morton Music 2" from the album Nothing Was the Same.

Listen to Drake's new single below.