Fresh off stepping on Kanye West’s DONDA campaign with the release of his Certified Lover Boy album, Drake is right back at it with another strategic move in their ongoing back-and-forth.
Celebrating his album release, Drake shared a guest mix on SiriusXM’s Sound 42 show early Saturday morning (Sept. 4), in which he decided to play an unreleased song from Kanye West and André 3000 called “Life of the Party.”
The song, which Kanye had previewed during recent listening sessions, is both incredibly beautiful and wild confusing at the same time. After a short intro from Kanye, 3 Stacks kicks things off with an absurdly heartbreaking verse about the loss of his mother, where he raps:
“Hey Miss Donda,
If you run into my mama, please tell her I said, ‘Say Something”
I’m starting to believe ain’t no such thing as heaven’s trumpets
No after-over, this is it, done
If there’s a heaven you would think they’d let ya speak to your son
Maybe she has in the form of a baby’s laugh
I heard passing by in a stroller remind me, ‘Hey, keep rolling on”
I don’t know, maybe she has with a prick of a blade of grass
I’ve been layin’ on way too long, got me itchy
Got up and roamed a lil’ more
Miss Donda, if you see my mama, tell her I’m lost
You see, she’d always light a cigarette, we talk, I would cough
Exaggeratin’ a lil’ bit so she get the point
Tryna get her to stop smokin’, I would leave and fire up a joint
Till I quit, started back up again, twenty years later”
This is followed by Kanye starting his verse with, “Momma, your son in the red hat, had suffered set-backs/ Had shouldn’t have said that’s, had made everyone mad/ He made 808’s, so he’s everyone dad,” before referring to himself as a young Vladimir Putin, claiming the “red hat” again, calling out the Kardashians (“Over y’all dead body, fore my daughter pose in Playboy/ We don’t condone over-sexualization of the kids in the home”), telling CyHi the Prynce to kick rocks after he told him “Sicko Mode” (where he landed writing credits) was his biggest song, and even randomly rehashed the South Park “fish sticks” joke.
Then, things take another turn, with Drake becoming the center of attention:
”I put Virgil and Drake on the same text/
And it wasn’t about the matching Arc’teryx or Kid Cudi dress/
Just told these grown men stop it with the funny shit/
[…]
Thought we was the new Abu Dhabi/
Told Drake don’t play with me on GD/
And he sent that message to everybody/
So if I hit you with a WYD/
You better hit me with, ‘Yes sir, I’m writing everything you need’/
I told you I was gonna take the summer back/
So any of the cap, won’t take none of that/
Where my motherfuckin’ red hat?”
The song (which you can find through Google) ends with a vocal sample of the infamous clip of the late DMX where he’s comforting his daughter on an amusement park ride.
It’s unclear why “Life of the Party” didn’t make it onto Donda. Was it the DMX clip? Maybe Jay-Z’s verse on “Jail” wouldn’t have been cleared with the whole “red hat” talk?
Who knows… but here we are, with another page in the Drake vs Kanye “beef” being turned. Tune in next week, or a few hours from now, as I’m sure something else will pop up.
UPDATE: Since the song has been leaked, André has issued a statement about his involvement and intentions with the actual song. “The track I received and wrote to didn’t have the diss verse on it and we were hoping to make a more focused offering for the Donda album, but I guess things happen like they are supposed to,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that it was released in this way and two artists that I love are going back and forth.”
