Intro

The curtain-raiser on Drake's debut mixtape, this intro functions less as a song than as a statement of intent from a Toronto kid with no record deal and a lot to prove. It reads as the first audible draft of the mission-statement mode Drake would return to across every project that followed — a young artist narrating his own arrival before the world had agreed he'd arrived. The production from Noah "40" Shebib and Boi-1da is spare and atmospheric, an early sketch of the moody Toronto template the two would eventually make famous. As a curtain-up moment it sets the tape's tone: ambitious, slightly anxious, hungry. Heard in retrospect, it's the sound of a career clearing its throat.