Blue Ivy Carter is pop and hip hop royalty — but Drake is absolutely not paying homage to Beyonce and Jay Z's little girl on the illustrated cover of his new album, Nothing Was the Same.
The "Started from the Bottom" rapper unveiled the art last week; created by artist Kadir Nelson, the image portrays Drake against a cloudy blue sky facing a young African-American child with an adorable afro. Some fans on Twitter half-jokingly wondered why Beyonce's firstborn made an appearance on the cover. "Why is Blue Ivy on Drake's album cover?" one fan tweeted. "Drake put Blue Ivy Carter on his new album art #notmad," another wrote.
The cutie is, instead, a younger version of the rapper, he explained to MTV recently. "It's a child version of myself staring at myself now. Sometimes when I try and think back on this journey, it's so hard to pinpoint all of these moments and it gets foggy," explains Drake, who pulled off a stunning performance at Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards, and briefly recreated the profile-view image from the cover.
"Even on past albums when I've been trying to tell this story, I've got there, but maybe not got there all the way," the Grammy winner, 26, continued. "And what that album art is to me is, like, this is my most clean, concise thoughts from now, and my best recollection of then. That's really what that cover's about."
