Many of us spend days or weeks tirelessly working on our music, devoting hour after hour into painstakingly refining the details of each song. Sometimes, though, the most impactful ideas can come together in very little time at all.
This was seemingly the case for hip-hop producer DJ Mustard, who has revealed in an interview with Billboard that he made the beat for Kendrick Lamar's chart-topping Drake diss track Not Like Us in "approximately 30 minutes".
“We wrote it in about five minutes”: Interrogating the myth of the quickly-written hit song
Released in May, Not Like Us was the final blow in Kendrick Lamar's feud with Drake, the fifth instalment in a series of takedowns that many believe ended with Lamar coming out victorious. The track was a huge commercial success, landing at No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and breaking the record for the most Spotify streams in a single day for a rap song in the platform's history.
Elsewhere in the interview, Mustard gives fans a number of insights into the making of the track, name-checking Dr. Dre as a conscious influence. "When I was making it, in the back of my head it was 'what would Dr. Dre do if Lil Jon was in the studio and they were collaborating on a beat'? That was my thought process," he says.
Mustard also refutes speculation that he used a sample from Nas' 2001 track Ether, another diss track aimed at Jay-Z, and reveals that he didn't hear the finished song until it dropped online. "I heard the song when everybody else heard it," Mustard says. "I never heard it before - I was never in the studio with them".
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