Drake’s hotly anticipated new album Certified Lover Boy is finally here, and it has a killer feature that’s shaking up rap Twitter. That’s right, just one week after Jay-Z appeared on Kanye West’s Donda, Jay paid a visit on Drake’s new album too.
On CLB’s “Love All,” Jay-Z closes out the track with a lengthy verse that echoes everything the Brooklyn rapper has embraced since 4:44: family, his past vs. his present, and the cost of backstabbing friends. The feature ends with a killer line, “Everybody want something / You know the price of everything but the value of nothing.”
Of course, rap fans know Jay-Z just contributed an equally sick verse on West’s “Jail,” a haunting and highly anticipated hit song that opens Ye’s Donda. With references to Jay’s long-time friendship with West, including their hit collab Watch the Throne, it’s a tearjerker of a feature off one of the album’s most intense hits.
But both features come fresh off a strange beef between Kanye and Drake. The two rappers have a difficult history that was dug up again after both sides’ collaborators began scuffling on social media. West turned the heat up when he compiled an Instagram group chat with nine people, one of which presumed to be Drake, with a Joker still seemingly promising that Drake “will never recover.” Their two albums released in one week of each other following the text, with Donda on Aug. 29 and CLB today, Sept. 3.
All the while, Jay-Z seems to have swooped in and left his mark on both of their work, wowing the internet in the process with the strange twist. As one meme puts it, “I’m playing both sides, so that I always come out on top.”
Rap Twitter is torn as ever about who came out with the better song.
Either way, you better believe Jay-Z is laughing it all the way to the bank.
The most iconic duality of man since Spider-Man 3.
Beef or not, in the end, it’s all about the cash.
As for the beef? As long as there’s no diss on CLB, Kanye says he’s ready to squash the beef. Let’s hope that’s the case, as getting a collab between these two rappers again would be legendary.