It’s been a year since Drake and Chris Brown were involved in a nightclub scuffle at former New York City hotspot W.i.P., where both bottles and fists were thrown and the venue was trashed. Brown and his bodyguard were injured during the melee, and NBA player Tony Parker sustained a scratched cornea. Drake, 26, denied any involvement in the fight, though sources said he and Brown got into an altercation over shared love Rihanna.
“I hear he has everything he could want now,” Drake says in the July issue of GQ, alluding to the fact that Brown and Rihanna were, for the moment, back together. “I don’t want my name to be synonymous with that guy’s name. I really don’t. I wish we could sit down, just like you and me are right now, and talk it out man-to-man. But that’s not going to happen. I’m not confrontational, but if someone challenges, I’m not going to back down.”
Drake continues, “It’s embarrassing, the amount of media coverage. Two rappers fighting over the woman. He’s not even a rapper, but still, it’s the last way you want your name out there. It distracts from the music. But he’s made me the enemy, and that’s the way it’s gonna stay, I guess.”
The “Started from the Bottom” rapper insists he doesn’t spend too much worrying about Brown, 24. “If I think about it too much, I feel it wrapping around my foot,” he says, “like I get a feeling it could end really badly.”
Despite his differences with Brown, Drake has made another famous friend since dropping his Room for Improvement mixtape in 2006: Will Smith. Instead of talking about show business, however, the new pals discussed something far more personal.
“I had lunch with Will Smith, and listening to him talk, it made me think I don’t know what love is,” the Canadian musician tells GQ of Jada Pinkett Smith‘s husband. “He said something profound. He said love is when you become one and you need that person. It’s not about wanting anymore, you need that person. Hearing that, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that way. I’ve held women in very high regard almost to the point where I felt like I needed them for a very long time, but I don’t know if I comprehend it yet, and I’m okay with that. I’ve made a lot of music about love being the only thing I’m missing.”
Currently single, Drake says he’s more focused on his career at this point in his life. “If I wasn’t doing this, man, and I was back home in Toronto, and I had my job that kept me in the city, my girl would be my life,” he explains. “I have a lot of friends back there, and their relationships have become the focal point, the high point of their lives. And that’s cool. I just have new goals, new places to go, new people to meet. I live a different high point every day.”
Drake is hard at work on his new album, Nothing Was the Same. “You know the way fighters don’t f-ck before the fight? Sometimes I feel like I’m so focused on training my body and getting my mind right to create this album that sex isn’t one of my main priorities,” he reveals. “If someone is around that I know and trust, I’m down. But I’m not going to end up with some stranger at this party.”
The rapper once vowed to bank $25 million by the time he was 25 — and he did. But for the multiplatinum star, that’s still not enough. “Rapper’s aren’t the really rich ones,” Drake says. “We all have nice houses with studios and cars, but you need a piece of someone’s business to be super wealthy.”
With that in mind, Drake is working with advisers to find investments that will net him $250 million by the time he’s 29. “I feel this great responsibility to see how far can we take it,” he tells the magazine, “how out of reach can I set that bar for whoever comes after. While I’m here, I’m gonna keep pushing that bar higher and higher up and make you really work for it.”
