Underlying Beef Between Drake & Lyor Cohen?

Complex magazine chops it up w/ Lyor Cohen. They talk Drake, Cudi, Free Music, etc. Although he doesn’t go into great detail, he does mention his disappointment w/ Drake on the business side…Peep a few excerpts below:

Speaking of new artists, many people were expecting Drake to sign with you at Warner Music. Did it disappoint you that he ended up going with Universal Motown?

Lyor Cohen: A very disappointing thing. But I’m a lover of rap music. I want good things to happen to this industry. I have so much good fortune and already have everything. I feel like we have a terrific company, and we’re very old-school in that once we grip someone’s hand, fundamentally we believe that’s a deal. But that’s not this generation. They’ll grip someone’s hand and say they’re coming, but if someone offers them more they will renege. That’s not how we get down.

Did Drake do that?

Lyor Cohen: I’ll keep that between Drake and myself.

Have you met any young executives that you see a lot of yourself in?

Lyor Cohen: I haven’t. Only because this generation is handicapped by the era of excess. I grew up in an era of love and swimming upstream, determined to prove people wrong. We had chips on our shoulders, like, “We belong here.” But now it’s the most popular, biggest segment of the industry. We’ve had a decade of private planes and Maybachs. That’s not the era that I came from. The era I came from, I had zero expectation that I was going to make any money. I was determined to prove to the gatekeepers of the industry that we had a place here and we weren’t going to relinquish our opportunity. I never had to keep up with nobody because we were all on subways. So it was never like, “My subway is bigger and flyer than your subway.” And there was a real fraternal order. We were backstage with Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring, and we had zero fucking money. But everybody wanted us in the VIP room because we were doing something that was so important to them. People understood that it wasn’t if it was going to happen, it was when it was going to happen. 

Speaking of new artists, many people were expecting Drake to sign with you at Warner Music. Did it disappoint you that he ended up going with Universal Motown?

Lyor Cohen: A very disappointing thing. But I’m a lover of rap music. I want good things to happen to this industry. I have so much good fortune and already have everything. I feel like we have a terrific company, and we’re very old-school in that once we grip someone’s hand, fundamentally we believe that’s a deal. But that’s not this generation. They’ll grip someone’s hand and say they’re coming, but if someone offers them more they will renege. That’s not how we get down.

Did Drake do that?

Lyor Cohen: I’ll keep that between Drake and myself.

Have you met any young executives that you see a lot of yourself in?

Lyor Cohen: I haven’t. Only because this generation is handicapped by the era of excess. I grew up in an era of love and swimming upstream, determined to prove people wrong. We had chips on our shoulders, like, “We belong here.” But now it’s the most popular, biggest segment of the industry. We’ve had a decade of private planes and Maybachs. That’s not the era that I came from. The era I came from, I had zero expectation that I was going to make any money. I was determined to prove to the gatekeepers of the industry that we had a place here and we weren’t going to relinquish our opportunity. I never had to keep up with nobody because we were all on subways. So it was never like, “My subway is bigger and flyer than your subway.” And there was a real fraternal order. We were backstage with Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring, and we had zero fucking money. But everybody wanted us in the VIP room because we were doing something that was so important to them. People understood that it wasn’t if it was going to happen, it was when it was going to happen.

Compliments of Nah Right. Full story here @ Complex.