The Motto

Halloween 2011: Drake hands Power 106 a finished track that isn't on the standard pressing of Take Care, then posts it to his OVO blog the next morning. The song is The Motto, and it pairs him with Lil Wayne, the mentor and label boss who signed him to Young Money. When the album lands on November 15, the track exists only as an iTunes digital bonus. Two weeks later, on November 29, it goes out as a proper single through Young Money, Cash Money, and Universal Republic.

The structure is simple on purpose. Wayne opens with a verse, Drake takes the middle, and Tyga slides in for the third, trading bars over a minimal, radio-facing beat. The hook does the heavy lifting: You only live once, that's the motto. Nobody involved could have guessed how far that six-word phrase would travel. By the following spring, YOLO had escaped the song entirely, showing up on t-shirts, in tweets, and eventually in a Drake line on Nothing Was the Same that treated the acronym like a relic already.

Chart-wise, the single did what bonus tracks almost never do. It reached the top of both Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and Hot Rap Songs charts, moved past three million US copies, and closed 2012 at number 20 on the year-end Hot 100. The 55th Grammy Awards gave it a Best Rap Song nomination. Lamar Taylor and Hyghly Alleyne directed the video, filming around the Bay Area with E-40 and Mistah F.A.B. dropping by, and it surfaced in February 2012. [edit]