Yasiin Bey—better known as Mos Def—recently sat down for an interview with The Cutting Room Floor podcast, where he opened up about his feelings toward Drake’s music. Simply put, the veteran MC doesn’t think the music he’s making is Hip-Hop at its roots. Instead, he compared it to background music at Target.
“Why you doing this to me?” he began when asked if Drake was Hip-Hop. “Drake is pop to me, in the sense like, if I was in Target in Houston and I heard a Drake song… it feels like a lot of his music is compatible with shopping. Or shopping with an edge in certain instances… It’s likable. It’s…likeable.”
From there, Mos Def began to laugh like crazy, clearly unable to hold his composure after saying what appeared to be something he didn’t even believe.
“Whoo! So many products,” he continued. “So many SKUs. Look at all these SKUs. Oh, so many products. I love this mall! Look at this place. I mean, look at this place. They have everything. Everything’s here. This is the new Drake, you hear it? It’s great. ”
Popping out of character, he then asked, “What happens when this thing collapses? What happens when the columns start buckling? Are we not in some early stage of that, at this present hour? Are we seeing the collapse of the empire? Buying and selling, where’s the message that I can use? What’s in it for your audience apart from banging the pom-poms?”
@tcrfff 🎙️Season 5 Episode 2 #yasiinbey ♬ original sound – The Cutting Room Floor
In 2018, Ice Cube predicted Drake would no longer top the charts, saying, “He had a good run. You’ve only got a three-year run in the rap game baby. You’ve only got three years at the tip-top of the rap game before you have to find your place in this thing. That’s just the pattern. Everybody, Wayne when he was hot, three years on top and you were looking for somebody else.”
Drake, however, disproved the “three-year” theory with 2021’s Certified Lover Boy, 2022’s Honestly, Nevermind and 2023’s For All The Dogs as well as 2022’s Her Loss with 21 Savage—all of which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.