Wait, Did Drake Write the Theme Song to a Popular Japanese/Canadian Cartoon?

Illustration by Alex Cook

When you’re one of the biggest artists in the world, people are bound to make up things about you. Just ask Drake, who has been the victim of rumor after rumor during his six years in the spotlight. Most of those revolve around jaded women or illicit activities, making for the kind of juicy tabloid gossip that looks great on MediaTakeOut. But with the constant Drake drama, who really cares if Drake upset a stripper or was left a menacing voicemail? There are at least two songs dedicated to those specific issues on his new album, If You’re Reading This It’s Already Too Late, alone. Recently, a more interesting and bizarre Drake rumor surfaced and went viral on Tumblr (hat tip to to Vice producer Eleanor Fye for noticing). According to the viral post—and, it turns out, just about every source of information on the topic available online—Drake rapped on the theme song for an animated TV show called Spider Riders that ran from 2006 to 2007.

Continued below.

"Spider Riders logo" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia

Spider Riders is an animated cartoon produced by Cookie Jar Entertainment of Canada and Bee Train of Japan about “Hunter Steele and his battle spider” who “defends the world of Arachna.” The theme song is understandably epic, with a disembodied voice busting hot rhymes and encouraging listeners to fall into line by “calling all spider riders.” The rapping is completely uninspired and generic, but that’s perfect for a song about fighting robot spiders, since that sort of content really sells itself. It also doesn’t sound like Drake. However, the song is credited to Drake almost everywhere you look: it’s on Wikipedia, it’s on the show’s own wiki, it’s on IMDB. Not a single one of these places even raises a question about the possible fact that Drake voiced a theme song about robotic spiders (and the people who ride them). That’s too bad, since this rumor is definitely false.

To investigate, I called the company behind the theme song. According to Bridget Flynn, Executive Producer at Grayson Matthews, Drake did … NOT make the song. “Despite some online speculation that Drake performed on this track, it is not true,” she told me. Flynn went on to reveal the true identity of the actual rapper on the track. “The vocalist is Clip (Jason Dantes Balde) of the hip-hop group BrassMunk.”

BrassMunk is a hip-hop group from Scarborough, Drake’s home away from home. They released their last album in 2007, which is around the time that Spider Riders came out. It’s unknown what happened to the group (King Reign still has a solo career), but it can only be assumed that Clip thought Spider Riders would be his big break—or at least a good check. I reached out to BrassMunk and Drake for comment, but did not receive a reply from either. It’s unclear how the case of mistaken identity ever got started (maybe in the internet’s mind, all rappers from Canada are the same?), but, if I were Drake, I would settle it with a battle atop robot spiders. Comments to both camps were not returned, despite the gravity of this Spider Riders debacle.

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