Drake’s game-changing 2015 mixtape If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late introduced that famous ‘6’ drop, and now we’ve got the inside scoop on its origins.
For the mixtape’s 10-year celebration piece with Complex, assistant engineer Evan Stewart cleared up the mystery behind the ‘6’ tag that fans have been debating about for years. “So… the 66666 thing, that’s not a sample,” Stewart revealed. “Jelleestone, he was like the biggest rapper to make it from Toronto back in the ’90s, we got him to do it because he’s got a really big, deep voice. I drove to go pick him up and brought him in. He went, ‘123456789—it’s the 10 crack commandments.’ So I recorded that. I guess I’m on a lot of different records because of that too.”
The signature sound blew up on the mixtape and became a staple on Drake’s OVO Sound Radio when it hit Apple Music’s Beats 1 in July 2015. Everyone thought it was sampled from The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments,” which itself borrowed Chuck D’s countdown from Public Enemy’s 1991 track “Shut ‘Em Down.” Turns out, it’s actually Toronto’s own Jelleestone, who had several Canadian bangers in the early 2000s.
During that 10-year anniversary deep dive into If You’re Reading This, Stewart also tackled those pesky ghostwriting rumors that followed Drake after the tape dropped.
“So the whole ‘ghostwriting’ thing… One thing about it all is they kind of take a different approach to rap music,” Stewart explained. “It’s not your typical, just sit there and bars, bars, bars. It’s a pop music approach when it comes to making rap music. Like, they’re looking for the best songs, the best lyrics, the best beats, and they’re trying to make the best song they possibly can with what they get. That’s their outlook on it.”
