Drake Covers Complex Magazine, Talks Rap Feuds, Street Cred And Love

Drake has no delusions of himself as a gangster. He knows he’s at his best when paring down real-life events and emotions other rappers would never tackle. “Any musical sound is real to me,” Drake says as another round of drinks hits the table. “It doesn’t matter if it’s from like Lana Del Ray all the way to Future from Atlanta or ASAP Rocky. Sonically, you can do whatever you want. That’s the beautiful thing about music: you get to make a choice. The more you can start pinpointing pieces of your actual life and start pulling it into your music, people will be like, ‘Damn, that’s something I’ve only thought about, but this guy put it into a song.’ ” He mentions the drunk-dialing ditty “Marvin’s Room” as one example of a song drawn from his daily life.

But if music is a blend of reality and artistic license, where does Drake’s talk about catching bodies fall? “Who’s going to catch a body with all these [n-words] rapping about murder?” he asks. “Who’s really putting a body on a gun?” C-Murder and Gucci Mane come to mind, but I say nothing. “When I say, ‘You’re going to make someone around me catch a body like that,’ that’s something you can ask them about.” He points to his boy Chubbs—the one who’s “in love with street [isht].”

“Everybody wants to poke and jab at Drake because they don’t feel like he will throw back,” says Chubbs, who met Drake nearly four years ago. “But nobody around here is going to let something happen to him at any time, especially me. I’m not ever going to let nothing happen to him. If it’s going to happen it’s going to happen to me first.”