DMX Thought 1 Drake Album Was Insulting
This year, the feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar has made headlines, but the former previously feuded with a different artist: DMX. DMX once spoke in depth about how much he disliked Drake. He said that there wasn’t anything charitable he could say about the other artist. One of his major problems with Drake had to do with an unreleased album.
DMX didn’t like the way Drake went about one album
In 2012, Drake announced plans to release a posthumous Aaliyah album. The late singer died in a plane crash in 2001, long before Drake rose to fame. Few people who knew Aaliyah, including her immediate family, supported the project.
“There is no official album being released and supported by the Haughton family,” Aaliyah’s brother, Rashad Haughton said, per Rolling Stone.
DMX acted in the film Romeo Must Die with Aaliyah. The pair also collaborated on the song “Come Back in One Piece.” He found it distasteful that Drake didn’t include any of Aaliyah’s collaborators on the album.
“You’ve been given the opportunity to do an Aaliyah album, yet you don’t include anyone that she worked with personally,” he said on MTV RapFix, per Rolling Stone. “What part of the game is that? How do you do that? How do you disregard what this woman did? What this beautiful angel did? . . . How do you just go with it? Your balls ain’t that big.”
Producer Noah “40” Shebib eventually called off the album.
“The world reacting to Drake’s involvement so negatively, I just wanted nothing to do with it,” he said. “Ultimately, I wasn’t comfortable and didn’t like the stigma.”
DMX said there wasn’t much about Drake that he did like
The Aaliyah album wasn’t DMX’s only problem with Drake. In fact, he said he liked very little about the other artist.
“I don’t like anything about Drake,” he said on The Breakfast Club, per NME. “I don’t like his f***ing voice. I don’t like the s*** he talks about. I don’t like his face. I don’t like the way he walks, like nothing. I don’t like his haircut.”
DMX’s words are reminiscent of Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 diss track “Euphoria,” in which he raps, “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, the way that you dress.”
He eventually changed his opinion on the other artist
Four years later, DMX’s opinion of Drake had softened. He admitted he once hadn’t been a fan of him.
“I did always say that he was a talented lyricist, but I was not a fan — you’re right,” DMX said in a 2016 interview with The Breakfast Club.
He appreciated the fact that Drake reached out about sampling the Ruff Ryders on his album Views.
“[It was] another humbling experience,” he said. “Like, Yo, you didn’t like this dude for all the wrong reasons … For him to take the effort — first, to want to use a song of mine — and then to be man enough to reach out and make that call, homie, hat’s off, man. That was a real move.”
