Ismail would stay out of the conversation for the first twenty minutes, then he would offer, “Listen, Sadiq is a fan - I think he knows what he’s talking about.” My young brother Dejuan Fard would roll with Ismail Latif and I around town and he, like half of the young Black men his age (he was in High School at the time) wanted to rap, and I would wrangle with Dejuan about what Drake, T.I., Jay-Z, and Lil Wayne were saying, this was back when Genius was still Rap Genius. But that August I spent in Denver, I learned that wasn’t the case. We’d listen to: “Show Me a Good Time” (the singing is tolerable and accompanied with rap), “Light Up” (which offers, in my opinion, a great Jay-Z verse), and “Miss Me” (which was one of the last verses that I could tolerate from Wayne), and then we would be done with that album.Īfter a trip to New Orleans, I was off of the MIS, but I still listened to Thank Me Later, I didn’t think I did it that often. No one I knew wasn’t listening to them singing tracks either. A few days later in Miami, I swear I heard “Find Your Love,” three times on the way from the airport, and six times in between.īy the time we were rolling from Boston to New Jersey, I wasn’t alone. But I learned…those weren’t the tracks that were getting the burn…it was the singing songs. The songs that I preferred, most notably “Light Up” and “Miss Me,” offered the same. I had actually been anticipating Drake’s album, his appearance on Timbaland’s Shock Value II being the source of that anticipation.Ĭritics hated the song saying Timbaland’s voice was unnecessary but I felt it provided a needed contrast and as we listened to Thank Me Later on the 80 mile drive from CHA to Manchester, Tennessee, I maintained that thought. These memories are tied together - Bonaroo, The World Cup, Extreme Heat, Stuck in Mud, Early Copy of Thank Me Later. The constant, the through line in all of these cities was Drake. This is the pertinent information: I was in a lot of different cities, in a lot of different clubs, with a lot of the people doing the same shit, with the same music playing everywhere, dressed alike, and behaving similarly. I’m not going to go into all the detail about the Industry shit because it’s irrelevant to my story. When I wrote about How I Got Over, I called that the Post Music Industry Shit album, well, boys and girls, this here is the MIS (Music Industry Shit) album.
It was a little easier to admit that I was a fan of Thank Me Later - it was the early stages of the World of Drake - people were still attempting to impress with their bars less apt to sing, most rappers viewed Drake as an anomaly.
During the summer of 2010 I was debating lyrics off the album with a high school student, and Ismail had me admit it. I smail Latif forced me to be real with myself not once but twice.
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