Once again, Drake has broken the Internet. This time, the award-winning Canadian singer rapped a single line in Lebanese, and that was enough to make some Lebanese people go bananas.
Featuring in British rapper Headie One’s latest song, titled Only You Freestyle, Drake had every Lebanese listener rewind at the 0:43-0:46 part to make sure they weren’t “hearing things.”
No, they weren’t, and yes, Drake did sing some lyrics in Lebanese.
“Habibti, please, ana akid inti w ana ahla,” Drake rapped, which roughly translates to: “My love, I’m sure, you and I [together] look better.”
Though his understandable broken pronunciation of the words made them sound more like “khabibti” and “akhla,” it’s safe to say that he did hold his own rapping in Lebanese as the lyrics were relatively easy to comprehend.
Of course, Lebanese fans – and non-fans – were not going to let Drake’s three-second-lingo fling pass by unnoticed. Some praised the attempt while others made fun of the rapper’s pronunciation.
“I keep telling y’all drake is Lebanese bro,” one Twitter user wrote.
Another one hilariously tweeted: “Drake finally claiming his south Lebanese side on dat song dis da best thing we done since discovering da color purple,” effectively massacring spelling, grammar, and punctuation while giving an unanticipated shout-out to the Phoenicians.
Others seemed dumbfounded by this unexpected-yet-welcome surprise and wondered, “where did this broken Lebanese dialect come from?”
While it was “akid” unexpected to hear Drake rap in Lebanese, it’s actually not that surprising considering the creative minds behind the singer’s fame and incredibly successful brand are, in fact, Lebanese. Two of his most notable team members, Noah and “Ollie”, producer and brand manager of OVO, are Lebanese.
Several people picked up the correlation and deduced that the Lebanese lyrics was the “impact” of Drake’s “Lebanese friends.”
Will this craze motivate Drake to drop some more fun bombs in Lebanese in the future? Hopefully, but probably not.
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