Drake Started His Career Writing For Dr. Dre At Aftermath [Updated]

John Seabrook's new best selling book The Song Machine: Inside The Hit Factory, contains a couple of rather surprising passages about Drake.

According to Seabrook, Drake worked at Death Row. [See update below clarifying he meant Aftermath.]

At Death Row Records, Dre’s hip-hop hit factory in L.A., dozens of young beat makers and topliners put in long hours. The Canadian rapper Drake worked there for a while, before he was famous.

What's confusing about this is that Dre left Death Row in 1996 -- when Drake was ten -- and formed Aftermath. Death Row was around until 2006, so Drake certainly could have worked there right before he got big. But it's unclear if Seabrook really means Death Row, or if he's confusing it with Aftermath.

Regardless, Drake definitely worked at one of them.

"It was some of the most strenuous militant shit I’ve ever done," Drake is quoted in the book as saying. "But no useable songs came out of it. When I think of how he worked us, it’s no wonder he didn’t get anything out of it. It was just writers in a room churning out product all day long."

Given this, it's weird that we've never heard Suge Knight (or Dr. Dre) try to claim Drake.

Update: DJ Booth reached out to Seabrook and, yes, he had his facts a bit wrong.

But Drake did actually work for Dre at Aftermath in 2005. He was paid 10 grand, lived in LA, and may well have had been involved with Detox, which has long been the rumor. (Lil Wayne rapped about "me and Drizzy" working on Detox on his verse of the Drake track 'Ransom'.)

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