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Drake’s longtime friend and collaborator Noah “40” Shebib recently sat down with Rolling Stone for a rare and wide-ranging interview. During the discussion, he finally addressed his feelings about being dragged into Drake and Pusha T ’s beef via lyrics on “The Story of Adidon,” and offered his thoughts about the ranking of Drake’s discography.
On “The Story of Adidon,” Pusha mocked 40 for suffering from the degenerative neurological disease multiple sclerosis, rapping:
OVO 40, hunched over like he 80—tick, tick, tick
How much time he got? That man is sick, sick, sick
At the time, 40 responded by posting a link about World MS Day without saying anything else. In his Rolling Stone interview, however, he offered further insight into his thought process at the time.
“I guess all I’ll say is that was just a different thing for me,” 40 said, noting that the line made him feel “Like sh-t, for sure. Like sh-t.”
40 noted that he tried to use the moment to shine a light on everyone who suffers from MS. “Ultimately, I like turning things into positive situations or brighter sides. And if that brings awareness to my disease on a bigger level, I was happy about that. That’s what I used it for,” he said. “That ultimately is a good thing for me. I like that transaction we had from that perspective. I’m very vocal about it.”
He does, however, think Pusha crossed a line. “Of course,” he said. “That was something different than a bar in a song. That’s cool, I barely know that guy.”
Drake previously spoke out about how Pusha mocking 40’s MS was the worst part of their beef during an appearance on LeBron James' HBO series, The Shop. “I' ma tell you, wishing death on my friend that has MS,” he said. “I study rap battles for a living, now when you mention defenseless people who are sick in the hospital, that passed away, that really sent me to a place where I just believed then and believe now that there’s a price to pay for that.”
Elsewhere in the interview, 40 decided to rank Drake’s entire discography, omitting only More Life because it was billed as a playlist. His ranking was as follows:
He still thinks of Drake’s breakout mixtape, So Far Gone, as their crowning achievement, and opened up about how the two of them crafted its lo-fi sound together.
[It’s] a plug-in that I use called lo-fi, low-fidelity. 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. [I wanted] a sound around Drake so that his vocal could cut, so you could understand every f-cking word perfectly, because I thought his words were so important and this was a space now that he could exist completely in the front, and everything else would be in the back supporting it.
Read 40’s full Rolling Stone interview here and catch up on all the lyrics to Drake’s biggest hits on Genius now.
