Showbiz may look like a neutral field from afar, but connoisseurs of craft know it is the real poet of the screen. In the city of dreams, re-inventions are a constant, but loyalty is a distant memory. Drake’s lyrical fireworks with Kendrick Lamar may have echoed through the year. However, with 2024 winding down, his past skirmishes with Ye aka Kanye West reveal they all have one thing in common: an expert understanding of hip-hop’s intricacy. A leaked relic from their past collaboration now has fans wistful of what could have been, serving as a poignant reminder of the devastating cost of stardom.

Ye and Drake started as friends before time took its turn, and they encountered the fork-struck roads. A decade-and-a-half journey has witnessed the mercurial relationship between these two hip-hop powerhouses evolve, devolve, and never reboot. But the Internet has its funny ways of conjuring the ghosts of the past, and Donda Times on X recently sent fans on a wonderland of what-ifs with an alleged instrumental leaked from the rap titans’ abandoned collaborative album, ‘Wolves.’ 

It is difficult to reset the clock to when Ye and Drake were friends. However, the leaked instrumental, shared with the caption, “calabasas is the new abu dhabi,” prompts a major ring. In 2016, the Atlanta rapper appeared for an OVO fest in Toronto, where he played a mini-set before teasing a collaborative record with Drake. Later that month, billboards cueing at the project reportedly popped up in LA with the same quote, stamped with the logos of OVO and Ye’s G.O.O.D. Music labels.

Yeezy Membership and Monthly Drops: Here Is All That Is Planned for Ye's Fashion

As a forgotten melody rekindled hip-hop’s golden flames, fans were left navigating the way out of the sonic time capsule.

Industry skirmishes are a traditional wisdom every artist can attest to, saying, been there, done that. By now, beef is a well-worn idea, but only in hip-hop does it potentially carry an entire culture overhead. However, with the digital age easing the fans’ exposure every other day from what it was only yesterday, these periodical leaks remind the roads these artists took, eventually abandoning them and leaving fans in a vacuum.

Though the recent memory of Ye-meets-Drake was during Kendrick Lamar’s face-off with the latter, fans could not help but lament the era of “peak music.”

A few folks even got down to namedropping the artists in the thread, urging reconciliation, hoping it would lead to the album release. Considering Ye has not really played by the book for any of his latest rollouts, with a forthcoming one already sparking concerns of mirroring the previous strategies, the likelihood of the fans’ dream boxing to the imagination is strikingly higher. However, their unrelenting disappointment shows that even the biggest wordsmiths are not immune to showbiz playing the ultimate architect of dreams.

Ye Put Fat Joe Through Some Brutal Studio Sessions, Singer Recalls His 'Exhausting' Time at the Rapper’s

What do you think of Ye and Drake's leaked collaboration? Let us know in the comments below!