Welcome to Sleeper Hit Support Group, a column diving into the song currently occupying the bottom spot of the Billboard Hot 100.

In a pop landscape that asks more questions that it answers, I'm setting out to answer three questions about each of these songs: how it got here, if the song is good, and where it's going. In this 100th spot we'll find unlikely ascents, falls from grace, and resurgences of hits from bygone eras.

Today, we're taking a look at "MR RECOUP" by 21 Savage & Drake.

How did it get here?

The time of Drake's imperial reign on the charts is not too far in the rear view. You could even argue it still hasn't fully ended, considering he was still able to send two songs to #2 after being publicly humiliated on the most watched broadcast of any given year. Drake has been complaining about fake friends in the industry in his lyrics for well over a decade, but the one person who's seemed to remain by his side unconditionally despite his ever-growing public scrutiny is 21 Savage.

Drake and 21 Savage have now been collaborators for a decade. "Sneakin'", which featured a then up-and-coming 21 Savage, was one of three loose singles that Drake released in October of 2016. It peaked at #28 the following month, but it is just a thoroughly unmemorable song. It's typical mid 2010s Drake trap fare, and even when the two went on tour together in 2023, the song was never performed.

The two didn't collaborate again until after the turn of the decade, but the extent and purpose of their association is very clear to anyone with half a brain cell to ponder it.

To put it simply, Drake will, by nature, never have any of the street cred that 21 Savage has. Drake is Canadian, half-Jewish, and began as an actor in a teen drama series. He's not from the streets, never has been, and never will be. 21 Savage (despite being the subject of one of the funniest days on Twitter when people found out he was born in London) is of the streets. His brother died in a drug deal gone wrong, he was expelled from his middle school for repeated offenses of gun possession, he joined a Blood-affiliated gang after leaving juvie, and he almost died in a gang-related shootout on his 21st birthday. That's the life that he came up in, and the tragedies that surrounded him when he was in the thick of that lifestyle inspired him to start rapping. In a 2015 profile with the Fader, Metro Boomin described 21 Savage as “...one of the last real street n****s left making music."

Over the last five years, Drake has been standing next to 21 Savage (literally or otherwise) whenever possible to make himself look tougher than he actually is. "Mr. Right Now" was the first time the two would reach the top 10 together, and it's the blueprint of the Drake/Savage playbook. The two spend the track's runtime bragging about how famous they are and how good the sex they have is. They're not "Mr. Right", but they are "Mr. Right Now". Drake takes the premise a smidge too far by invoking SZA: "Yeah, said she wanna fuck to some SZA, wait / 'Cause I used to date SZA back in '08 / If you cool with it, baby, she can still play / While I jump inside that box and have a field day"... gross! But the song sold, and so would many more of their collaborations to come. They would send ten more songs to the top ten, and five more songs to the top 30.

In an act of chucking potfuls of spaghetti at the wall, Drake released two albums in 2022. The dance-driven detour Honestly, Nevermind brought 21 Savage his second-ever number one hit with "Jimmy Cooks", which sounds completely out of line with the rest of the record. So naturally, it's the most successful song on Honestly, Nevermind by a large margin, with more than triple the streams of any other song on the record.

The success of "Jimmy Cooks" sent a clear message to Drake: there is demand for this duo. Just five months after Honestly, Nevermind, Drake would release Her Loss, a full collaborative album with 21 Savage. And to Drake's credit, it did sell. The week of its debut, seven of the songs in the top 10 of the Hot 100 were from that record, with "Jimmy Cooks" still sitting comfortably at #6. The record's biggest hit, "Rich Flex", was kept off the number one spot by Taylor Swift's dominant Midnights single "Anti-Hero".

To call Her Loss a traditional collab album, though, would be a lie. 1/4 of the record's runtime are solo Drake songs, and he hogs the mic on much of the collaborative songs to boot. Drake's exploitation of 21 Savage's street cred wasn't explicitly called out by anyone until May 4th, 2024.

"Once upon a time, all of us was in chains / Homie still doubled down callin' us some slaves / Atlanta was the Mecca, buildin' railroads and trains / Bear with me for a second, let me put y'all on game/ The settlers was usin' townfolk to make 'em richer / Fast-forward, 2024, you got the same agenda / You run to Atlanta when you need a check balanced," begins the third verse of Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us", the single most detrimental event of Drake's career.

Lamar continues the verse with examples of rappers Drake used to legitimize his blackness and capitalize off of those same men, including 21 Savage. "21 gave you false street cred... You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars / No, you not a colleague, you a fuckin' colonizer."

This clearly did not result in 21 Savage distancing himself from Drake or vice versa, but it doesn't seem the spaghetti is sticking for them much longer. 21 Savage released his seventh album WHAT HAPPENED TO THE STREETS? this past December to little fanfare, as is typical for December releases. "MR RECOUP" is the duo's latest collaboration (their first since the beef), and as of this writing, Drake's most recent work in general. Not only is this their only collaboration that hasn't hit the top 40, it is their lowest-charting collaboration ever, peaking at #51. It returned to the charts this week at the bottom spot after a week off the chart altogether.

But with all that said...

Is the song any good?

No. This song sucks. I haven't even developed Stockholm Syndrome from it – that's how you know it really sucks. It doesn't even get the fundamentals right, and most of that stems from how terrible the beat is.

Lyle Winklerprins, who makes beats under the name Whiskerprince, produced the godawful beat of "MR RECOUP". Who is Whiskerprince? Nobody. He has no other notable credits, and according his Behind The Beat video with RapTV, it seems Drake was sitting on this beat for six months and Winklerprins wasn't notified that it'd be used on anyone's record until the night before its release.

From some light internet digging, Winklerprins is an environmental engineer in his late 20s by day, and sells beats on his website by night. I will spare this man from my words, but I will share this Tweet with zero likes from his page and move on. This should give a solid idea of what kind of guy we're dealing with. Regardless, I hope he continues fighting the good fight for the environment.

The beat is hollow and rudimentary in a way that makes it sound like Baby's First FL Studio Project. The piano line is entirely unchanged from the stock preset, and sits off-grid intentionally (according to Winklerprins himself) but without any real effect. If you were interested in the fine craftsmanship behind this beat, you can watch Winklerprins' episode of RapTV's Behind The Beat below.

As for the verses themselves, Drake is just thoroughly unconvincing in this "tough guy" persona. He covers up his lack of involvement with actual street altercations by claiming he has hitters that do it for him, but that doesn't really sound convincing either. 21 Savage has to pick up the pieces Drake knows he cannot carry himself. Vulture's Craig Jenkins puts it better than I ever could:

"A single line of gun talk in Drake’s 'Recoup' rhymes feels like playing to the room, just passing the mic to someone with much more to say on the subject. There’s an emotional canyon separating Drake’s 'They can’t find the shooter, bitch, ’cause it’s us' and the Savage verse that picks up after it: 'Niggas shot my brother, now I don’t know who to trust.' One minute, gunplay is a tool in an arsenal of bluster and the next, it’s a decision holding mortal consequences."

There's laziness leaking from every corner of this production, and its tumble to the bottom of the charts is a direct reflection of the formula's expiration. Besides Drake's most loyal acolytes, nobody wants this.

Where is it going?

There is no saving this song. It will be lost to obscurity in due time. I could say that 21 Savage should get away from Drake, but at this point, them doubling down on their partnership is probably the smartest thing for both of their careers. You cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube.

I don't really know where Drake goes from here. Not even the world's best publicist could maneuver the endless barrage of PR nightmares Drake is imbuing on whoever is in charge of managing said nightmares. He's fighting a RICO case for selling gambling to kids to inflate his streaming numbers on top of doubling down on the "Not Like Us" defamation lawsuit by trying to appeal its dismissal. Someone will make a movie about this one day. It'll be a really funny movie.

Ultimately, if there's any silver lining here, it's that "MR RECOUP" did not make enough money for Whiskerprince to quit his day job saving the planet.