Toppa Top 10: Drake’s Most Dancehall Moments

Words by Richard “Treats” Dryden, Nadine White and Desmond Alphonso
Original Illustrations by Robin Clare

As far as we know, Drake has never recorded with a dancehall artist, or voiced a track on a dancehall riddim. Yet, he’s been teasing a dive into the genre for nearly his entire career. He’s fostered a friendship with Popcaan, rolled through Jamaica with Mavado, and offered to soundclash Lil Wayne. His latest overture to a genre that is clearly one of his greatest influences came in the form of his “Hotline Bling” video, in which he is seen doing the Log On dance (among other steps) with Jamaican-Canadian choreographer Tanisha Scott.

Scroll through for a rundown of all of Drake’s most notable “dancehall moments.”

10. Drake Adopts Jamaican Slang, Bigs Up Vybz Kartel, Buju Banton + Beres Hammond on Social Media

Drake’s Twitter and Instagram voice often have a Caribbean inflection, peppered with Jamaican phrases like “way up,” “mans dem” “dun know,” and “mawd tings.” For Drake, a Canadian who grew up in the heavily Caribbean city of Toronto, adopting patois in his everyday way of speaking comes across fairly natural, much like how the son of a Memphis singer has internalized Southern rap drawl. You could compare it to Azealea Banks’ adaptation of Dominican slang (the Harlem rapper, though African-American, grew up around Dominicans, exposing her to their food, music, and of course language) or how Yasiin Bey has weaved patois and Spanish into his recordings. This is the power of rap that is stronger than Rosetta Stone.

Drake has also taken to Twitter to show support for some of reggae’s embattled icons. On June 23rd, 2011, the date Buju Banton was sentenced to 10 years in a federal U.S. prison, he tweeted, “Free up da man dem from capitivity.” In May of 2012, he added his voice to the chorus of artists proclaiming, “FREE KARTEL” and later tweeted a pic of Vybz with the caption, “Mi Daddy. Forever Wurl Boss.” He’s also RT’ed a fan‘s proclamation that she’d like to have Beres Hammond sing at her wedding, showing that he’s got love for Lover’s Rock, too. Beres even responded, saying he’d be glad to sing at Drake’s wedding. (Though this video has since been pulled down for unknown reasons.)— Richard “Treats” Dryden

9. Drake drops Jamaican slang on “5 am in Toronto” (2013) and in his “Jungle” short film (2015)

Drake doesn’t just use Jamaican slang on Twitter. You can hear it pop up from time to time in his lyrics, too. Notably, on “5 am in Toronto,” Drizzy uses the Jamaican colloquialisms “Tr8, Y Pree”; the latter expression, which essentially means “why you watching me? ” was popularised by Vybz Kartel; the former is an affirmation closely associated with Kartel’s protege, Popcaan. He can also be heard speaking with something of a West Indian twang in his promo video for “Jungle.” If you google ‘Drake’ and ‘accent’ then you’ll witness some of the debate that this caused. However, many Torontonians identify twang as their natural accent, owing to the city’s large Caribbean community and its linguistic, cultural influence. Tr888. — Nadine White

8. Drake flexes his patois with Mavado in Montego Bay (2011)

While in Jamaica in 2011 to record at Port Antonio’s Geejam Studio, Drake stopped by the Brit Jam concert in MoBay for a surprise appearance during Mavado’s set. The Gully Gad brought out Drake during his performance of “Star Bwoy,” and young Drake was up for the challenge of a Jamaican crowd, offering the following stab at patois: “True, mi from farin. But everywhere mi go dog, mi seh Jamaica to the bloodclot world, dog. Big up Mavado, big up di General, Alliance, Gully, dun know.” Things then took a wrong turn, however, when cops arrived on stage to reprimand Drake for saying bloodclot. It seems that while Drizzy boned up on his patois before taking the Brit Jam stage, he didn’t bother to familiarize himself with Jamaica’s obscenity laws. — Desmond Alphonso

7. Drake sings Kranium’s “Nobody Has to Know” onstage in Houston (2014)

Though it took two years until it got a proper push to the mainstream in the form of this summer’s official remix with Ty Dolla $ign, Kranium’s “Nobody Has to Know” has been a hit in the dancehall since way back in 2013. We knew it had reached smash status when Drake sang the track during a performance last summer at Warehouse Live in Houston, back in 2014. — Desmond Alphonso

6. Drake challenges Lil Wayne to a sound clash (2011/2014)

In a 2011 interview with Billboard, Drake announced his intent to challenge his mentor Lil Wayne to a sound clash, in a monumental nod to Jamaica’s musical culture. “Me, I go to Jamaica a lot — I love Jamaican culture — so what I’m gonna do, I’m challenging Lil Wayne to a sound clash,” Drake said at the time. “I want Wayne to come out on stage with a mic and I’m gonna have a mic, and we’re gonna have both our DJs, and we’re gonna battle song-for-song and see who the people love more. And that’s how it’s gonna go.” Three years later, the “clash” came to fruition, in a sense, on the “Drake vs. Lil Wayne” tour of 2014.

It didn’t entirely follow the blueprint of a Jamaican soundclash — in which DJ crews go head to head in a war of song selections, words and exclusive dubplates— but the tour saw the artists performing their hit songs in a similar back-and-forth battle style, with one artist emerging on top each night based on fan response. The Capcom-sponsored tour was modeled after a classic Street Fighter video game, from the big screen behind the artists, to the promotion, which included an app for concertgoers to vote for who starts each show. — Nadine White and Richard “Treats” Dryden

5. Drake threatens to drop a dancehall record and start a sound system (2011)

When Apple Music was announced at the top of the year, Drake was named as one of the many celebrity spokespersons for the fledgling music streaming service and artist-curated radio station. As it turns out, his OVO Sound Radio programming has been in the making at least since 2011. Back then, we reported that Drake was threatening to make a dancehall record (album? single?) and was starting his own sound system after spending some time in Jamaica shooting the video for “Find Your Love.” OVO Sound Radio has its roots in what he then, in an interview with Much Music personality T-RexX, dubbed Voodoo Child Sound. With OVO Sound, he and the October’s Very Own crew have armed themselves the way DJs equip themselves for soundclash, running dubplates from Bounty Killer and Beenie Man in their broadcasts. And on the show’s fifth episode, it featured a guest mix from famed Miami sound system and Fully Loaded champions Black Chiney. Shaky warriors beware. — Richard “Treats” Dryden

4. Drake appears in Popcaan’s “Unruly Prayer” video (2015)

This clip was shot between Popcaan’s turf in St. Thomas, Jamaica, and Toronto, Drake’s hometown, and the track even mentions Drake by name, so his cameo is appropriate. Moreover, it demonstrates the solidarity between the two musical giants who have been rolling with, and publicly endorsing one another, since 2012. (More on that below…)— Nadine White

3. Drake Does the Log On with Tanisha Scott in his “Hotline Bling” video

Illustration: Robin Clare

Drake took a progressive approach to source material on “Hotline Bling,” includes a sample of Timmy Thomas’ “Why Can’t We Live Together” and echoes aspects of D.R.A.M.’s “Cha Cha,” while the music video borrows visual tropes from Director X’s early takes with Sean Paul. Speaking with The Fader, he compared such “borrowing” to the culture of dancehall, where artists will record their version of a song to a popular riddim: “You know, like in Jamaica, you’ll have a riddim and it’s like, everyone has to do a song on that.”

In the video, Drake’s fourth with Director X (the half-Trinidadian Toronto native directed videos for “HYFR,” “Started from the Bottom,” and “Worst Behavior”), the pair revisit timeless Jamaican dance moves like the Log On with Jamaican-Canadian Tanisha Scott in the video’s choreographed sequences. When Drake steps into frame to dance with Scott at the three-minute mark, he is specifically tracing X’s own moves from Sean Paul’s “Gimme The Light” video, in which the director famously stepped from behind the camera to do the Log On (a move created by dancehall icon Gerald “Bogle” Levy and popularized internationally by Elephant Man in a 2001 song of the same name) with Tanisha. — Richard “Treats” Dryden

(Editor’s Note: In another nod to yard, a prying Drake finger-wags, “Why you always touchin’ road?”)

2. Drake Features Popcaan on If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late (2015)

Drake and Popcaan have been mutual fans of each other since Poppy’s Yiy Change mixtape, and have since supported each other’s projects: Drake tweeted lyrics from Popcaan’s opus “Only Man She Want,” and OVO Niko from Drake’s crew directed Poppy’s “Unruly Rave” video and the web doc 6 in The 876, in which the OVO and Unruly crews roll together through JA. Dialogue from that video appears all over 2015’s mixtape release If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. Though he doesn’t add any original lyrics to the project, Popcaan can be heard on “Know Yourself,” reciting his intro from “Ghetto (Tired of Crying),” as well as speaking on “No Tellin” and “Star 67.”  Elsewhere, Drake has been using slang like “unruly,” “way up” and “nuh shake” coined by Popcaan’s crew. You may have also heard him pronouncing himself “Way Up” on Big Sean’s hit single, “Blessings,” ushering the term into American vernacular.

The Unruly Boss’ influence on the IYRTITL project was enough to warrant an entire article in Complex, with Popcaan stating: “Big up Drizzy Drake anywhere him deh, ’cause them man say OVO unruly, so it’s a good feeling.” — Richard “Treats” Dryden

1. Drake Shoots His “Find Your Love” Video with Mavado in Cassava Piece (2010)

Drake has reserved some of his biggest shows of love for Jamaica for the visual realm. True, the melodic loop at the center of the Kanye West-produced “Find Your Love” evokes dancehall in a subtle, undercover kind of way. But the song’s connection to the Caribbean was solidified when Drake and director Anthony Mandler headed to Kingston—specifically the Gully Side, Cassava Piece— to shoot the video, with local legend Mavado cast as a don whose girl Drake foolishly pries away. The video got some flak at the time from Jamaica’s then tourism minister Edmund Bartlett for its portrayal of shotta culture, but was mostly well-received by fans of dancehall. (It’s also said that Drake pledged to donate $25,000 to a learning centre in Cassava Piece). It was this video that gave the newly minted Canadian rap star dancehall credibility, establishing a precedent for just about everything else on this list. — Desmond Alphonso

+1: Snoop Lion feat. Cori B and Drake – No Guns Allowed

Drake’s only appearance on a song that actually sounds like reggae gets an asterisk. In fact, Snoop Lion’s entire reggae project, Reincarnated, recorded in Jamaica with an entirely non-Jamaican cast, gets the proverbial asterisk. It wasn’t exactly bad, but it wasn’t exactly legit, either. — Desmond Alphonso