Trippie Redd confesses in a new interview that he once composed a rap to the 6 God in a letter as a school project, confessing in a new interview that he unwittingly manifested his relationship with Drake in seventh grade.
The Ohio native discussed the genesis of his varied sound with The New York Times for its Hip Hop’s 50th anniversary piece published on Wednesday (July 19), describing how it featured a letter to his future “Betrayal” collaborator.
Trippie said, “My mom used to listen to oldies, like 2Pac, Biggie, JAY-Z, Ja Rule, that deep sound. “And my dad preferred to listen to street underground from that time period. People like Ampichino, Fred the Godson, Jadakiss, the Jacka, and Rich the Factor. Then my uncle would listen to more contemporary music, including tracks by [Lil] Wayne, Drake, and [Young] Thug.
“When it came on YouTube, I would go listen to rock music on my own time, so bands like Kiss and the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. They had a music on the game I used to play, Saints Row, and it turned me into a fan.
“When I was young, my brother passed away, so that kind of gave me that drive to start wanting to make music,” he explained. And I used to freestyle for maybe two or three hours while sitting on the steps at my grandmother’s house. At school, we would occasionally be required to write on small pieces of paper, so I would demonstrate my penmanship. My school projects would be cool. I’m going to write Drake a letter, for instance. I actually done that as well. To Drake, I composed a rap. I believe I was in seventh grade.
I first tried playing around with Auto-Tune to find my own sound. Auto-Tune and other such things are what introduced me to SoundCloud. I started recording music around the same time as Ugly God, Playboi Carti, and Lil Uzi Vert at the beginning of that really underground era.
But it wasn’t until the XXXTENTACION and Juice WRLD period that I became popular. I enjoyed Lil Peep and X. If you visit my SoundCloud, you’ll see that X, Lil Peep, and Uzi were all involved.
Since Trippie Redd entered the music industry in 2017, the two have gotten along well. In reality, Trippie had already recorded part of his verse for Drizzy’s 2018 hit song “God’s Plan,” but he ultimately missed the deadline. He went into great detail about how he botched the deal in an interview from August 2019.
