What’s So Special About This Kanye West & Drake Album Anyway?

It’s been a pretty busy time for rapper, beat-making extraordinaire turned entrepreneur Kanye West, but then again, when is it not? Amidst calling out the Tidal and Apple Music streaming beef, or proposing possible furniture endeavours with IKEA, he also managed to join the 6 God, Drake. at his annual OVO Fest in Toronto.

Onstage, Yeezy managed to not so subtly hint that the pair indeed have something up their sleeves, and this isn’t the first time the pair have brought it up. Earlier this year Drake revealed in an interview with Beats 1’s Zane Lowe that he and Kanye had spoken about doing a mixtape, but nothing had been mentioned since until this recent show.

West asked the crowd, “Is y’all ready for the album…I wanna ask y’all right now. Are y’all ready for this album?” he said pointing to Drake. Drizzy later clarified this by saying, “What my brother was asking you before was, are you ready if we make an album?”

Drake and Kanye West discuss dropping a joint album at #OVOFest2016 pic.twitter.com/dPuYDvHvYz

— Nigel Int'l D. (@Nigel_D) August 2, 2016

Fans have gone wild at the prospect of a full length collaboration project between the two hip-hop artists. Their past collaborations have been extremely well received, from Papi’s most recent Pop Style to the Yeezy produced Find Your Love back in 2010. Therefore apart from being fan favourites, the pair certainly has a strong history to bounce on.

But what’s so special about this possible Drizzy and Yeezy collaboration anyway? Well to start off, the pair are arguably at the height of their fame. Alongside West’s hugely successful fashion career and entrepreneurial life, his most recent album ‘The Life Of Pablo’ amassed a staggering 250 million streams, not to mention a whopping 500,000 illegal downloads thanks to the Tidal exclusivity.

Think that’s crazy? Drake’s most recent album has amassed a staggering half a billion plays in it’s entirety, not to mention the fact it’s been sitting on the US Billboard charts for 12 weeks now.

The timing for this collaboration couldn’t be any better either. Its been five years since Jay Z and Kanye West linked up for ‘Watch The Throne’, their full length album. With its ground-breaking theme about the social costs of wealth and the implied responsibility, it was a joining of two of the largest hip-hop artists ever, and it changed the game completely. Since then there hasn’t really been a lot of these full collaboration projects, at least not to ‘WTT’s scale, so why take advantage of the gap and just redefine everything once more?

Aside from the popularity contest, musically Kanye himself is a visionary. Sure his technicality when it comes to rapping hasn’t been at it’s highest form lately, but he still covers deeper topics like family, his struggles, his success, racism, and faith. Despite Drake being an amazing artist who dominates the charts, this is something we rarely see from him.

Therefore who knows what the collaboration could do for the pair of them. Imagine the pair being pushed by each others’ creativity, we could see a whole new poetically sharper Kanye, a deeper, conscious Drake, backed by a project with a bold narrative – revolutionary would be an understatement.

On top of all that this could inevitably spark a huge discussion in the streaming wars which Kanye was so frustrated about. Seeing as Drake is an Apple Music posterboy and Kanye is with Tidal, maybe a partnership between the two was the plan all along.

Nonetheless, this project itself is still entirely speculation, nothing has officially been announced as of yet, but c’mon, something’s surely happening. Considering Drake and Future produced their 2015 tape ‘What a Time To Be Alive’ in only six days, the album’s release can’t be that far away…can it? If it is true, all we can say is…we are not worthy!