Back to Back

Album: not included on an album (2015)
Charted: 21
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Songfacts®:

  • This freestyle is the second diss track directed at Meek Mill following "Charged Up" after the Philly rapper accused him of not writing his own raps. Drake spits:

    This for ya'll that think that I don't write enough
    They just mad 'cause I got the Midas touch
  • Drake also brings Nicki Minaj into the mix by poking fun at Mill being the opening act on his girlfriend's Pinkprint Tour:

    You love her then you gotta get a world tour
    Is that a world tour or your girl's tour?
    I know that you gotta be a thug for her
    This ain't what she meant when she told you to open up more
  • The song cover on Soundcloud shows a photo of Joe Carter, the first basemen of Drake's hometown team the Toronto Blue Jays, following his World Series-winning walk-off home run in 1993. Upon hitting the home run, Carter went into a hysteria, jumping up and down many times, most notably while rounding first base, where his helmet came off. Toronto's opponent that year was the Philadelphia Phillies, Mill's home town. The Blue Jays won the year before in 1992, earning "back to back" titles.
  • The beatmaker is Toronto producer Jahmar "Daxz" Carter, who also co-produced "6 Man" from If You're Reading This, It's Too Late. Daxz submitted the beat to OVO at 6p.m. on July 28, 2015 and by early the following day, the song had already been recorded.

    Daxz told Complex how he got a call from Noah "40" Shebib, the co-founder of Drake's OVO Sound label, to meet them in the studio later that night around midnight. "They told me they were making the track right there, and within an hour he dropped it on SoundCloud," he recalled. "It was 5 a.m., and he just dropped it. It all happened in the same day."

    "Around the time they were finishing up around the track at 4 a.m., I was sitting in the studio like, 'Is this s--t really gonna go down right now? Are we just gonna drop this randomly out of nowhere?,'" Daxz added. "I didn't take it in completely until the drive home, and when I got home, the entire Internet was going crazy."
  • Drake told Canadian celebrity interviewer Nardwuar: "'Back To Back' was what it was. It was a reaction to somebody trying to challenge my integrity and that's pretty much what's gonna happen anytime that happens. It is what it is. I did what I had to do."
  • Asked by Tax Stone on his podcast Tax Season what he thought when Drake dropped "Back To Back," Meek Mill admitted the song was "hot," but thought people overreacted to it.

    "I ain't think it was no s--- that people was gonna be like 'You got killed.' I thought it was hot,'" he said. "Like when we shoot at n---as, you gotta shoot a n---as through the heart. When you wake up in the mirror, you looking in the mirror, you hearing what the n—---as told you, some s--- about yourself that you can't even deal with. That's how we battle where we come from."
  • It was Serena Williams who advised Drake to drop a second diss track aimed at Meek Mill. The Toronto MC explained during a Rap Radar podcast interview that the tennis star urged him inside the studio. "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. You can't do some s--t for the moment and then it goes away."

    Drake added that after Serena's advice and hearing the menacing beat by Daxz, he went into "demon mode."

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