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Drake And Nicki Minaj Defend Spitting Written Freestyles

11:43 a.m. · November 10, 2009 · by Andrew Martin

These two Young Money and Lil' Wayne affiliates have caused caused some fan and critic uproar over the past few months when their "freestyles" turned out to be pre-written.

The hubbub over Drake came first when he appeared on Funkmaster Flex's Hot 97 show. As everyone saw when the video was posted online, the Toronto emcee didn't spit "off the dome" when asked to freestyle. Instead, he whipped out his Blackberry and gave a line-by-line performance of pre-written material. And, of course, there was plenty of blogger backlash and a parody video by Affion Crocket to boot.

Drake responded to the fiasco by outlining just how quickly the trip to Hot 97 was arranged. And it didn't help that the young MC was extremely nervous on top of that. 

"It was such a rookie hip-hop moment," Drake said in an interview with MTV. He went on to explain that most artists appearing on Flex's show, or any radio show for that matter, typically are prepared to rap a few verses. In other words, they're not actually "freestyling," per se, but more or less spitting memorized bars.

And Drake embraced it as what he called "probably one of the most interesting moments of my life this year."

"I'm a writer, man. I appreciate the elements of hip-hop," he continued. "I appreciate a guy like Common who goes city to city and just spits at the crowd for 10 minutes about everything he sees. I admire talent like that, because that's just not my creative process."

Nicki Minaj was a little less gracious about her critics, who went at her after her performance during on the BET Hip-Hop Awards cyphers. She appeared alongside Buckshot, Crown Royyal, and Joe Budden (who easily had the best verse in that cypher).

"How many people on that cypher do you think spit off the top of their head?" Minaj said during an interview with Richmond, Va., radio host TT Torrez late last week.

"I don't write off the top of my head. I can't come up with those punch lines and metaphors off the top of my head," Minaj said. She continued to say that there are few emcees out there aside from KRS-One who actually rap off the top.

Minaj then called out her critics for "tear[ing] apart a female, like, 'She did a good verse, but she wrote it.'"

"The only thing that matters is that I wrote on a paper and memorized it," she added. "Wayne never wrote my sh--. No one ever wrote my stuff."

Minaj has an untitled debut album scheduled for release next year while Drake's debut, Thank Me Later, will tentatively drop on Valentine's Day, 2010. [ MTV]