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Arogant Playboy Hollywood, for his debut song as a recording artist, has put out his cover of Drake’s “Shot for Me.”
The reason?
“It’s legendary,” he said. “I like the song. I’m a Drake fan. I mean, I listened to that song a lot before I even decided to cover it.”
And he had another reason.
“It’s way better than the one he did. Number one, I can sing better than Drake. I can rap better than Drake, and I can also go falsetto.”
Arogant Playboy also says he has better technology than Drake did when he was making the record, Melodyne rather than an early version of Auto-Tune. He has his own extensive studio at home and help from a talented engineer, Daniel Serper.
“I produced this song all by myself. I have one engineer, Daniel, and he’s a hell of an engineer.” Daniel did the Melodyne work for the song, and Arogant Playboy wants to give him credit for his work.
“He was the one who tweaked it for me and made it sound good, so, here’s a shout-out to him.”
He likes covering songs that appeal to him, no matter the genre. He has done covers of Coldplay, The Killers, The Weeknd. His opinion of covers is that anyone who covers a song should make it sound as close as possible to the original.
If you can’t cover a song without trying to make your own version of it, in his opinion, you shouldn’t be making covers. If you are going to pay homage to the original artist, pay homage. He can give you chapter and verse on the only two or three artists in the last 50 years who have covered songs and made them better.
He made two small changes to “Shot for Me.” One bleeped out the B-word (the one that rhymes with witch) and he changed the beat a little.
The firs was to make the song suitable for general audiences and get more play (“Drake should have made a radio version,” he said.), and the second was so that he could copyright this version.
Other than that, “I didn’t change it. It’s exactly like Drake’s. I try to pay homage and make it as close to the original as I can, and I did. It’s got the same tempo, the same beat, modified only a little—the same everything.”
But he also has a tremendous amount of original material that he has created in the last 20 or so years. He estimates it at about 14 albums worth.
He started rapping at 12 years old, got serious about it at about age 18 or 19. He was going to pursue basketball, but a stint in state prison put that out of reach.
“It wasn’t, really, but that’s what I thought at the time. So, I continued to rap, not so much singing, but kind of harmonized my music, and I rapped and wrote songs over the years.”
He grew up in Seattle, Washington, but moved to the Los Angeles area to get into entertainment, perhaps acting—“I’m a hell of an actor, too.” He has been in an independent feature film and a commercial.
But he got involved in day trading and has done that as his main career for about 15 years.
His idea of a music career is different. He has five artist names under which he puts out music. His next song will be original, but it may wear a different name.
“I’m gonna be different than a lot of artists for a lot of reasons,” he said.
The “Playboy” in this name has nothing to do with the magazine. It has to do with him being an actual playboy, he said.
“I’ve always wanted three wives.”
His career, he knows, is right at the beginning.
“I’m at the bottom of the totem pole. Nobody knows who I am, but when you are talking about talent, there’s a lot of rappers who are not at talented as me. And I can sing. All I need is a microphone.”
He is going to record more and perform live.
“Shot for Me” is the start.
“Like I said, it’s an awesome song. I think a lot of people are going to like the cover, and they’ll remember the original. I hate to say it’s better than the original, but it is, because it’s more modern. The things I used to tweak it weren’t available when Drake made the song, and the falsetto kills it. It’s just a better song. I pay homage to Drake, but my version is better than his.”
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