Switched On Pop: Drake’s “God’s Plan” & How Sometimes The Truth Don’t Rhyme
Read an exclusive excerpt from the new book ‘Switched On Pop: How Popular Music Works, and Why It Matters.’
Musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding have been hosting the popular music podcast Switched On Pop since 2014. On the show, the duo break down pop songs to figure out what actually makes them a hit. Today, they’re releasing a book based on the podcast titled Switched On Pop: How Popular Music Works, and Why It Matters. Much like the podcast, the book finds the pair breaking down songs like Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank)” and Rihanna’s “We Found Love” to explain what really made those songs the hits they were.
In an exclusive excerpt for Genius, the authors were kind enough to send us chapter “Sometimes the Truth Don’t Rhyme: Drake—'God’s Plan'” which breaks down just how the Toronto rapper’s unique rhyme schemes played a role in his massive hit. You can peep the excerpt below, and buy a copy of the book right here.
Last year, “God’s Plan” won a Grammy award for “Best Rap Song,” cementing its status as a modern classic. We can better understand the song’s success by examining Drake’s multiple approaches to rhyme, beginning with the rhyme scheme in the first verse of “God’s Plan”:
I been movin’ calm, don’t start no trouble with me
Tryna keep it peaceful is a struggle for me
The next two lines continue with the pair “cuddle” and “lovin.” What’s notable is that there’s not a single rhyme in the quatrain. At least, not a single perfect rhyme. “Trouble,” “struggle,” “cuddle,” and “lovin’ ” are what are called near rhymes. Perfect rhymes can begin with different consonants but share identical stressed vowels, and every syllable after the stressed vowel is identical.
If Drake had paired “I been movin’ calm, don’t start no trouble with me” with, say, “Hey Fred Flintstone, I got Barney Rubble with me,” “I always shave close so there’s no stubble with me,” or “Into telescopes? Check out the Hubble with me,” then he would have made a perfect rhyme. Instead he chose “trouble” and “struggle.” The two are close in sound. Near rhymes (also known as slant rhymes or half rhymes) share what the poet W. H. Auden called an “auditory friendship.” Because the ending “bul” and “gul” consonants of “trouble” and “struggle” differ, they can’t make a perfect rhyme.
Adept at gaming new digital music platforms to break Billboard and streaming records, Drake has seen huge commercial success while becoming a poster child for the ills of contemporary pop. One reviewer compared Drake’s flow to “catchy nursery rhymes” (they meant it as a compliment). There’s a simplicity to Drake’s lyrics that some find enchanting and others offensive.
Part of this comes from his frequent use of the simplest rhyme of all: identity rhyme. This is a rhyme in which the syllables of each word sound exactly the same—which is, basically, rhyming a word with itself. The chorus of “God’s Plan” (2018) kicks off with a titular identity rhyme: “God’s plan/God’s plan.” Identity rhymes mark key sections of Drake’s biggest hits. The chorus of “Started from the Bottom” (2012) repeats the same line with a small variation:
Started from the bottom, now we’re here
Started from the bottom, now the whole team here
So does the chorus to “Hotline Bling” (2015):
You used to call me on my cellphone
Late night when you need my love
Call me on my cellphone
Late night when you need my love
All these identity rhymes might be taken as evidence of a dashed-off approach to songwriting, but there’s something undeniably effective about Drake’s identity rhyme refrains. They strike a nerve, perfect rhymes be damned, because they reinforce the song’s emotional beats. “God’s Plan” is all about giving in to a higher power, so starting the chorus with an identity rhyme is a bit like reciting a mantra. “God’s Plan” shows how Drake navigates between perfect rhyme, near rhyme, and identity rhyme—the song makes use of all three varieties.
The decision of which rhyme goes where might be somewhat arbitrary, but there’s a method to the madness. Perfect rhymes pop up in the chorus: “won’t” and “don’t.” Their accuracy gives the section a chilly confidence. Near rhymes like “trouble” and “struggle” saturate the verses, as if Drake is gathering steam. As a bonus, Drake uses two types of identity rhymes. First, he repeats mantra-like phrases in the chorus (“God’s plan/God’s plan”) and the post-chorus (“Bad things/A lot of bad things”). Then, in the second verse he rhymes different words with the same syllables—“know me” and “no me”—keeping listeners on their toes.
How is Drake able to switch between different types so quickly and with such ease? The secret lies in his strict adherence to melodic repetition. In the first verse, every lyrical line follows the same melody—ditto in the first chorus, and also the post-chorus. Hearing these melodies over and over produces an almost hypnotic effect in the listener, a sign of Drake’s “nursery rhyme” approach. Even when the rhyme scheme shifts from perfect to near to identity, the melody never wavers, locking the listener into place. Drake’s lyrics get deeper under the skin, moving from the sharp “won’t” and “don’t” to the plainspoken “bad things/bad things.”
Modern pop is the Wild West of rhyme. Today, artistry is less about creating a perfect rhyme than massaging the sounds of words to produce maximum emotion, as in the awkward-yet-unforgettable rhyme of “broken heart” and “who I really are” in Ariana Grande’s “Break Free” (2014). Taking the practice to its logical end, some songs forgo rhyme altogether. Adele does this to moving effect in the chorus of ‘Hello" (2015):
Hello from the outside
At least I can say that I’ve tried
To tell you I’m sorry for breaking your heart
But it don’t matter, it clearly doesn’t tear you apart
Anymore
It’s all perfect rhymes (outside/tried, heart/apart) until Adele throws in that “anymore,” which topples the quatrain’s neat order. But that’s exactly the point. The lack of a rhyme adds to the melancholy surrounding a lost love—her broken rhyme shows us her broken heart.
The unorthodox approach to rhyme in Adele and Drake’s music is a core element of the sound of modern pop. As Chance the Rapper has pithily put it, “Sometimes the truth don’t rhyme.” Still, the first time we heard “God’s Plan,” we thought it was a dud. Then the track quickly smashed one record after another on its release—4.3 million plays on Spotify and 14 million on Apple Music in its first twenty-four hours; according to Billboard, it racked up 82.4 million total streams in its first week. We were clearly missing something, so we called up someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of Drake’s music: Jeremy Lloyd, one half of Marian Hill (with Samantha Gongol).
Lloyd theorizes that Drake’s success with rhyme relates to his embrace of hip hop’s turn toward singing in the mid-2000s, beginning with André Benjamin’s “Hey Ya!” in 2004. Around the same time, the pitch-correcting hardware Auto-Tune, as made famous by T-Pain, presented rappers with digitized perfect pitch. This new texture enabled rappers who would otherwise never sing to experiment with melody. Singing rappers—once an oxymoron—made the blurring of hip hop and pop possible, and this has become a defining aspect of modern pop. Drake takes advantage of Auto-Tune to merge melody, rhythm, and rhyme together into a sort of “super hook” of hip hop flow and pop-song melody. The identity rhyme that starts the chorus—“God’s plan/ God’s plan”—could have easily been rapped rather than sung. But Auto-Tune gives each “God’s plan” a crystal-clear melody, reinforced by a verbatim repetition.
Drake’s combination of melody, rhythm, and rhyme taps directly into human mechanisms of memorization, a kind of brain hack found across cultures. Neurologist Oliver Sacks explains:
Every culture has songs and rhymes to help children learn the alphabet, numbers, and other lists. Even as adults, we are limited in our ability to memorize series or to hold them in mind unless we use mnemonic devices or patterns—and the most powerful of these devices are rhyme, meter and song.
Put more simply, when we hear repeating musical patterns, we remember them, especially if the repetition is embedded across melody, rhythm, and rhyme. Drake’s “nursery rhyme” technique draws listeners in, but he’s careful to keep it from being too simple. He smartly introduces an element of variation by placing the second “God’s plan” on a different metric beat from the first. Displacing the motif from where we expect it to recur, Drake ensures that his repetition of melody, rhythm, and rhyme doesn’t become too predictable.
By shifting the metric location of the motif, Drake keeps it sounding fresh without changing a note. It’s an expert approach to identity rhyme, one that lodges the couplet in listeners’ brains without ever boring them—with no fewer than fifty-four variations of the motif over the course of the song. Thanks to this, even though we didn’t love “God’s Plan” after one listen, we could still sing its main hook. It worked on us despite our best efforts to forget it.
