The Unlikely Inspiration for One of the Biggest Songs of Drake’s Career

Drake has never needed an excuse to bark back and forth with someone in beef. As proven in his feuds with Pusha T and Kendrick Lamar alike, he’s willing to fall on his sword, even in defeat. Moreover, his track record is pretty strong, throwing shots at everyone from Tyga and Chris Brown to Jay-Z and Common.

One of his more lopsided feuds was against Meek Mill. He started the affair with a pretty tepid warning shot in “Charged Up” that suggested he wasn’t that interested in bickering with the Philly MC. But then he released “Back To Back”, the first diss song to ever be nominated for a Grammy. There, Drake trashed any ghostwriting allegations hurled at him and implied that Meek was hiding behind his then-girlfriend Nicki Minaj’s stardom.

From there, it was no question that the Toronto MC handily won the beef. Eventually, the pair reconciled their differences and collaborated again on “Going Bad” in 2018. But apparently, the Take Care rapper wasn’t initially going to make “Back to Back” at all.

In a 2019 interview with Rap Radar, he revealed that it was actually Serena Williams who empowered him to get back in the booth. The way she saw it, he was leaving matters unfinished if he didn’t try to end his adversary.

Serena Williams Talking to Drake is The Reason We Have One of The Biggest Diss Tracks in hip-hop History

“’You gotta finish it, I’m talking about done, over and it’s gotta be something that everyone that he’s with and him have to hear,’” he recalled the superstar tennis player telling him. “You can’t do some s**t for the moment and then it goes away. She kind of put the battery in my back.”

Then, he went into the studio, and “Back To Back” was the first beat he heard. All he needed was to speed up the tempo slightly, and history was made from there. Because Drake knew how serious a rapper and person Meek Mill was, he knew he couldn’t go lightly. Ultimately, he’s just glad that tensions didn’t mount so high that it turned into something much darker.

“These things go to another place. I could tell you firsthand that Meek’s not a pretender. He’s not a joker. He’s not beefing with one of these rap guys where their stories are all made up and they’re really not their characters… I wasn’t beefin’ with no punk,” Drake explained. “We had to turn that around ’cause we know how far it was going and almost went.”

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