“[The doctors] were not happy. Everybody said, ‘You fucked up. You lost 10 years, bro. What are you doing? Get on the fucking drugs, right now,'” he says. “They said about a third of my brain’s dead at this juncture.”
“What they’re talking about is a plug-in that I use called lo-fi, low-fidelity,” 40 explains of the engineering style he used on. “It’s reducing the sample rate, therefore the quality of the recording. Equivalent to rolling off the top end or making it muddier or sound like you’re listening to the speakers of a club from behind the wall.
“Funny enough, I’ve never discussed that line with Drake,” 40 says. “But my read of it and my understanding of it is that I was with him from the very beginning. I understand everything that was thrown at him. I was there. I think we’ve discussed the ’40 got a house on a lake’ bar more than ’40 knows how to deal with the pressure.'”, Drake went on to become the decade’s most commercially dominant artist and its most influential.
“I got lucky,” he offers next. “I won the lottery. So I often tell people, ‘The music business is something like the lottery. If you win it, fucking great, but lots of people don’t win.’ That’s why I can’t sit there and be like, ‘My talent is the reason I’m here.'” As a child, he fell asleep to the sound of his father banging away at a typewriter on scripts. Even then, the pattern of his father going years between jobs was evident. “[I would] watch him struggle and be celebrated at the same time,” 40 begins, visibly frustrated. “CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, would never hire my father, but they’d knock on our door and ask if they could interview him to do a documentary about how incredibly successful he is.
His freshman year in high school, 40 met Oliver El-Khatib, another Lebanese Canadian student, who would later become Drake’s manager and the man behind OVO’s aesthetic. “Me and Oliver met through grade nine homeroom, first day of high school,” he recalls. “It was like, ‘Wait, your name’s Oliver El-Khatib? Are you Lebanese? What the hell? You’re the lightest Lebanese guy I ever seen in my life. You’re whiter than me. This is crazy.
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