The Number Ones: Drake’s “God’s Plan”

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Why this song? Even Drake's biggest fans couldn't tell you. By 2018, Drake had been a massive star for nearly a decade, but he'd struggled to land a #1 hit for much of that time. He was the biggest name in rap by far, and he was on a couple of Rihanna tracks that reached #1, but Drake didn't get there himself until "One Dance" in 2016. "One Dance" wasn't necessarily an obvious smash, either, but it was Drake playing the pop game -- singing sweetly over a rich, bubbly dance beat. "God's Plan" was something else.

There's not that much to "God's Plan." It was Drake rapping simple king-of-the-hill shit over a simple beat. There are a few little singsong bits, but it's not really catchy, and Drake never quite bothers with the idea of carrying a tune. His lines aren't especially quotable, and he never eases out of the leaden, declarative flow that he can do in his sleep. There are lots of very good Drake songs, and there are even more just-fine Drake songs. "God's Plan" is a just-fine Drake song. There are a million Drake songs like that.

So why did "God's Plan" take over the world? This is not an exaggeration. The song immediately vaulted to #1 when it first hit the internet in the early days of 2018, and it became the biggest hit of the year. It did unprecedented streaming numbers, and it cemented Drake's place at the center of the pop universe. How? Why? Anytime we have to ask that question in this column, we get the same basic answer: Timing. By 2018, streaming had moved to the center of the music business, and playlist-friendly rappers became the rulers of the Hot 100. There were no rappers more playlist-friendly than Drake. Drake's time had arrived.

For 30 weeks in 2018 -- well over half the year -- Drake had a song at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. This was his year. Drake has had a lot of years -- too many years, probably -- but 2018 was the year that the pop charts truly and unmistakably belonged to Aubrey Graham, when everything lined up exactly right for him. Drake dominated 2018 like he was the Beatles in 1964 or the Bee Gees in 1978. Drake went on such a run that he apparently convinced himself that it was permanent, that no force could ever unseat him. For a long time, nobody proved him wrong. If you ask Drake, his dominance might come down to something more than timing. It might've even been God's plan.

"God's Plan" wasn't the plan. It was an improvisation, an attempt to stay ahead of a leak. In a 2019 Rap Radar podcast interview, Drake talked about making "God's Plan," and it sounds like the song was business as usual for him. The Minnesota-born producer Cardo Got Wings sent Drake a bunch of beats. Cardo is an ultra-solid rap producer with a clean, direct style, and I really like his full-length collaborations with underground-ish regional rappers like Payroll Giovanni and Nef The Pharaoh. Cardo got his big break producing mixtape tracks for Wiz Khalifa, and he went on to work on singles from artists like the Game and Kendrick Lamar. One of those Cardo beats stood out.

Cardo co-produced the original "God's Plan" beat with his regular collaborator, a guy with the exceedingly generic rap name Yung Exclusive. Cardo and Yung Exclusive had already worked together on big songs like ScHoolboy Q's "THat Part" and Travis Scott's "Goosebumps." ("THat Part" peaked at #40 and "Goosebumps" at #32. Travis Scott will appear in this column pretty soon.) Just last year, Cardo and Yung Exclusive worked on Kendrick Lamar's Drake diss "Euphoria," which is interesting. ("Euphoria" peaked at #3. It's a 9.)

In that Rap Radar interview, Drake said, "'God's Plan' was a song that I recorded on a whim in my condo and thought nothing of it. I only had the first verse and the hook." He wasn't even planning to keep it for himself. Instead, he thought it might work for Trippie Redd, the bleary drug-rap moaner from Columbus. (Trippie Redd's highest-charting single, the 2021 Playboi Carti collab "Miss The Rage," peaked at #11.) But Drake apparently never heard back from Trippie, which seems like a major-league fuckup on Trippie's part. Drake: "He was obviously caught up, busy, whatever, doing his thing, and I know people punish him for that. They shouldn't punish him for that, though."

That's one version of the story. Others are out there. I've encountered rumors about Trippie Redd recording a "God's Plan" verse and about Drake's team taking him off of the song because they were mad when Drake's chorus and his first verse leaked. Trippie himself once said that his DJ played the snippet at a New Year's party. Evidently, someone recorded it on a cell phone and posted it online, thus burning the bridge between Drake and Trippie. Stories like this follow Drake around all the time -- leaks, aborted collaborations, behind-the-scenes chess moves. In any case, the end result was that "God's Plan" became a solo Drake song, and that sure worked out well for Drake.

When the snippet leaked and people liked it, Drake rushed to finish the song himself: "I was worried that another artist was going to get the version and just start laying random verses on it, which back in the day was a huge hustle for people -- getting one-verse-idea leaks, and a random artist off whatever would be like, 'Yeah, this me and Drake's new shit!'" Drake finished the track in a couple of days. His production mastermind and best friend Noah "40" Shebib, who gets a shoutout in the lyrics, tinkered with the arrangement. Drake's regular producer Boi-1da added more drums because Drake wanted it to sound bouncier. Both 40 and Boi-1da are credited as writers and producers, and an A&R guy named Brock Korsan also has a writing credit for some reason that I couldn't figure out.

The "God's Plan" beat is nicely constructed, but it's nothing special -- some staccato synth-string churn, some standard-issue trap drum programming, a few little scraps of keyboard melody. It's expertly recorded and effective enough in a pedestrian way. I could say the same about Drake's performance. He does some nice little singsong bits that slide naturally into the punchier rap parts, but that's what he always does. His lyrics are all about how he doesn't have to worry about the bad things that people are wishing on him. He'd rather not beef with anyone, but he'll do it if you push him. And even if he dies, he's got friends who will broadcast his story into infinity. That's God's plan.

Imagine really feeling this way. Imagine being so convinced of the rightness of your success that you believe it's divinely ordained. That's medieval-monarch thinking. It's absurd, world-historical arrogance masquerading as chest-out confidence. In a very real way, it's also Drake's job. He has to project the feeling of total self-assurance so that we can listen to him and discover that feeling in ourselves. It's motivational, or at least it should be. I sometimes get that from Drake songs, but I don't really get it from "God's Plan." In my mind, a motivational rap song should make me want to run through a wall, and "God's Plan" is much too sleepy for that.

One of my biggest issues with the pop-superstar version of Drake is that he almost always sounds sleepy. His albums are vast, sprawling, endless collection of sparse, architectural sound and autopilot recitations of his own greatness. Drake can be exciting when he shows some energy, but those sparks have been less and less frequent since he started racking up #1 hits. I'm afraid that's going to become a common complaint in future columns, since Drake's #1 hits so rarely number among his best songs. On "God's Plan," the sleepiness is almost part of the text. The song's big moment, the one where the beat drops away, is the bit where Drake is like, "She said, 'Do you love me?'/ I told her, 'Only partly, I only love my bed and my momma, I'm sorry.'" And it's like: Your bed? I like my bed, too, but I'm not going to sit here and rhapsodize about it on what's supposed to be a motivational banger. That's weird.

Speaking of weird: Drake also routinely pulls the medieval-monarch move of acting like he's entitled to sex. It's just a throwaway line on "God's Plan" -- "don't pull up at 6AM to cuddle with me" -- but I still find it grating. It's one of the places where Drake's confidence routinely curdles into narcissism. I hear bits and pieces of that narcissism all over "God's Plan." It's there in the idea that we'll only appreciate Drake when Drake is dead and in the vague focus on all of Drake's naysayers. But that stuff is mostly just an undercurrent on this particular song, and it's not enough to drag it into the ugly places that plenty of other Drake songs go.

For the most part, "God's Plan" is Drake shouting out his friends. Sometimes, that's pretty arcane, as when Drake alludes to the Toronto Hell's Angels that he employs as security guards, always a risky strategy for pop stars. (Genius tells me that that's what "Eighty-one, they'll even bring the crashers to the party" is about. Never would've figured that out on my own. If the Angels were just bringing the crashers to the party, Drake got off easy.) Sometimes, the shoutouts assume more relatable forms: "Imagine if I never met the broskis." I don't think we, the listeners, are supposed to be all that concerned about the hellish alternate reality where Drake never met the broskis. I think we're supposed to consider how lucky we are to have our own broskis. That warmth, as well as the easy way the track slides along, keep "God's Plan" from becoming total wallpaper for me. But I still think of "God's Plan" as one of the most average Drake songs out there, which made its success all the more baffling.

But then again: Timing. Drake was in overproductive mode when he made "God's Plan." He was coming off the release of More Life, the very good 2017 album that he insisted on labeling as a playlist, and he was building up to the release of Scorpion, the self-indulgent blockbuster that would arrive later in the year. He was showing up on a lot of other people's songs and turning those songs into hits just by being there. In January 2018, just a few weeks after Trippie Redd's DJ allegedly played that "God's Plan" snippet at that New Year's party, Drake released his Scary Hours EP. He called it an EP, anyway. Really, Scary Hours is just two songs, which means it's a single with a B-side. The single was "God's Plan," and the B-side was "Diplomatic Immunity," a bitter-minded rappity-rap track that never appeared on a Drake album but still debuted at #7. (It's a 5.)

"God's Plan" came out at exactly the right time. The year was starting, and people needed something new. Drake was on fire, and the sleepy, melodic motivational-anthem approach of "God's Plan" was perfect for streaming-service playlists. Drake had finished an exclusive deal with Apple Music, so "God's Plan" debuted everywhere at once and set streaming records. After the song had its first few weeks at #1, Drake released the video, and it started the next wave. "God's Plan" was already huge before the video, but the video is the main reason that it's now arguably Drake's biggest song.

Director Karena Evans, an important Drake collaborator, opens the "God's Plan" video with these words: "The budget for this video was $996,631.90. We gave it all away. Don't tell the label..." We then get six solid minutes of Drake rolling around Miami, handing out vast stacks of money to people and being celebrated as a hero. Drake walks into a supermarket with a megaphone and announces, "Anything you guys want in the store is free." Drake presents an oversized check to a giddy college student. Drake plops down on a curb next to a mother and son, and they burst into tears as he hands them a stack of rubber-banded cash. It happens again and again, and even the most cynical of us might get caught up in the emotion of all these people suddenly having to struggle a little bit less.

The "God's Plan" video is a true masterstroke. For weeks before the clip came out, there were social-media stories about Drake spending time in Miami, handing out extravagant gifts seemingly at random. In the video itself, Drake looks like a star. People see him and lose their minds even before he presents them with money or cars or whatever. Drake and Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown look cool while dancing around in a department store. An entire high school exuberantly screams along with the line about only loving Drake's bed and his momma. The city looks beautiful, even as Karena Evans raises the stakes by showing the faces of people who need the help. Drake takes visible delight in the effect that his presence and his gifts have on people. Every little choice, every tilty camera angle and slo-mo pan, makes the whole spectacle hit harder.

There are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of the "God's Plan" video. The clips exists to work as promotion, but it casts Drake as a purely selfless giver, as if the only thing he gets out of it is the satisfaction of doing good. There's an element of fantasy, but it's not the fantasy of having a celebrity materialize before you and give you enough money to pay off all your overdue bills, though god knows that would be nice. It's the fantasy of being the person who hands out the money, the hero who brightens everyone else's lives.

Something like the "God's Plan" video can raise all sorts of thorny ethical questions. If charity is presented as self-promotion, is it real charity? How fucked is our society if so many people depend so heavily on the random altruistic whims of some rich guy? But also, is that Drake's fault? The man exists in the same vampiric system as the rest of us. He can't change it, but he can brighten other people's lives a bit, and that's what he does. The people in the "God's Plan" video are real, and their joy isn't just something that's been staged for the camera. That's good, right? I think it's good. I think it's mostly good.

The "God's Plan" video is propaganda, and it's very good propaganda. It makes me like the song more, which is ultimately the point. It hits me in the same way that an old episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition might've done. I have an emotional response, but it's an emotional response that I don't trust. Maybe I'm thinking too hard about this. Good video, anyway.

The "God's Plan" video did crazy numbers. As I write this, it's at 1.6 billion views. Other than the memed-into-infinity "Hotline Bling," it's the most-viewed clip on Drake's YouTube channel. I wouldn't be shocked if that video is the main reason that "God's Plan" stayed at #1 for as long as it did. But this was the peak of Drake's omnipresence, so it wasn't just the video. While "God's Plan" sat at the top of the Hot 100, other tracks with Drake features broke into the top 10. Drake rapped a verse on "Walk It, Talk It," a track from the Migos, former Number Ones artists and Drake Effect beneficiaries, and that song made it to #8. (It's an 8.) Another Drake collab charted even higher; more on that below.

The "God's Plan" single has gone platinum 16 times over, but the song was just the beginning of a Drake charm offensive that would have even greater chart consequences. In the months ahead, Drake would further cement himself the indisputable king of that moment's popular music. We'll see him in this column again very soon.

GRADE: 5/10

BONUS BEATS: I really, really liked the Jimmy Kimmel Live bit where Kimmelsidekick Guillermo Rodriguez staged his own extremely cheap version of the "God's Plan" video at a 99-cent store. Here it is:

THE 10S: "Look Alive," Drake's collaboration with little-known Memphis rapper BlocBoy JB, peaked at #5 behind "God's Plan," and this is the Drake shit that I love. The beat is ridiculously hard, the hooks stick, and Drake's polished swagger bounces off BlocBoy's explosive enthusiasm in ways that make both of them seen cooler. I'm so close to the game that I could steal the state sheet and tell you it's a 10.

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Imagine if I never wrote the bookski. Buy it here.