Thanks for all of the mailbag questions (and all of the questions asking “What’s a mailbag?”). My big takeaway is that you guys really care about AI and ØWay, which I get, because both are about to change the world.
I’ve always wanted to open up the floodgates because it feels like a way to get out of my comfort zone and consider topics that don’t come so naturally to me. I couldn’t answer every question, but maybe I’ll come back to the others some time. Or maybe this column will just be so awkward we collectively pretend it never happened like, “Meet the Grahams.” Well, that leads us right into the first question…
Q: Phons, have you ever heard about the theory that NWTS is supposed to mimic the Christopher Nolan movie Memento in how it’s supposed to be listened to? —Lucas
The idea of Drake intending for us to listen to Nothing Was The Same backward is headass as fuck. It gives me a belly laugh every time I think about it. I sort of wanted to shoo it away as a worm-brained conspiracy theory, but then again, Drake was the ultimate hip-hop forum nerd, and this is the kind of shit a hip-hop forum nerd foams at the mouth over.
Scanning Reddit and dormant hip-hop blogs, this theory goes back years, which makes sense because Nothing Was The Same was already his most over-intellectualized album. That never made sense to me because I always thought it to be a bottom-tier Drake record, though, at least before the 2020s hit. Mostly because I found that he tried too hard to tone down the memeable parts of Take Care and that it was the point where he started to make music with the discourse about him at the top of his mind. But back in the day, the East Coast beats and heady, autobiographical lens, had my friends talking about him for a few months like he was Aesop Rock.
Well, yesterday, I put my tin foil hat on and put the theory to the test. I listened to NWTS in the Memento-style, going from “Pound Cake/Paris Morton Music 2” to “Tuscan Leather,” and it’s true that the outro and intro appear to be interchangeable. But overall, the narrative isn’t really clear enough for me to buy the theory without having to force in stuff like “Started From the Bottom” (still terrible) is actually a subliminal hint and that his bar of “Lately I’ve been feelin’ like Guy Pearce in Memento” is anything other than him reacting like any other dude in their mid-twenties does to Christopher Nolan movies.
What I did come away with is that I dig NWTS more than I remember. “Worst Behavior”? An awkward banger. “From Time,” with Jhené Aiko, is one of his most intimate tracks of this era. I can still rap all of “Paris Morton 2,” especially the bits that just seem like he’s stressed out over his BlackBerry messages: “I text her from time to time, she a mom now/I guess sometimes life forces us to calm down.” Man, it was so much more fun to listen to Drake rap before all of his dreams came true.
