Trippie Redd manifested his relationship with Drake unknowingly in seventh grade, revealing in a new interview that he once wrote a rap to the 6 God in a letter as a school assignment.
Talking to The New York Times for its Hip Hop’s 50th anniversary feature published on Wednesday (July 19), the Ohio native broke down the origins of his eclectic sound and how it included a letter to his future “Betrayal” collaborator.
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“My mom would listen to oldies, like, 2Pac, Biggie, JAY-Z, Ja Rule, that soulful sound,” Trippie began. “And my dad listened to more like street underground from back in that era. People like Rich the Factor, Jadakiss, the Jacka and Ampichino, Fred the Godson. And then my uncle would listen to like more of the newer stuff, like [Lil] Wayne and Drake and [Young] Thug.
“On my own time, when it came to YouTube, I would go listen to like rock, so like Kiss and the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. I used to play Saints Row and they had a track on the game and it made me a fan.
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He continued: “My brother passed away when I was young, so that kind of gave me that drive to start wanting to make music. And I would sit at my grandma’s house and just rap on the stairs and be there for like two, three hours, just freestyling. We would have little things at school where we would have to write, so I would show my pen skills. I would make my school projects cool. Like, oh, I’m gonna write a letter to Drake. I literally did that too. I wrote a rap to Drake. I was in like seventh grade.”
“I started like experimenting with Auto-Tune and getting to my own sound. Auto-Tune and stuff like that, it got me into SoundCloud. That was like the beginning of like that super underground phase, Ugly God and Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert, I started making music around the same time as them.
“But I didn’t blow up until the XXXTENTACION and Juice WRLD era. I liked X and Lil Peep. If you go to my SoundCloud, it was really X, Lil Peep and then Uzi, too.”
Drake and Trippie Redd have had a good relationship since the latter got in the game around 2017. In fact, Trippie was originally slated to appear on Drizzy’s 2018 smash “God’s Plan” and had partially recorded his verse – but ultimately, he missed the deadline. In an August 2019 interview, he explained in detail how he dropped the ball.
“It’s no excuse, I could have did the song whenever I pleased to do it,” he said. “I had the song for two months. I could have did that shit. I was sitting back taking my time on it because it was like, if I get on this shit I really gotta snap. So I sat on the song for a little bit.”
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When Trippie’s DJ went to a New Year’s Eve party and played a snippet of the song, he made things a little too hot.
“He fucked it up because it was like now Drake wanted to drop the shit just because it was going around too much,” Trippie recalled. “It was too much going on. [Drake] just wanted me to finish it, that’s what he was worried about.”
A few years later in 2020, Trippie Redd tried to bate Drake into a redeeming collab. While it didn’t work, he did get his wish the following year on 2021’s “Betrayal” off Trippie’s Trip At Night album.
