Get It Together

"Get It Together" — Drake, Jorja Smith, and Black Coffee's Transatlantic Moment

A Project That Defied Easy Description

Spring 2017 found Drake in an expansive mood. Rather than releasing a conventional album, he dropped More Life in March of that year, describing it as a "playlist" rather than an album proper, a framing that signaled his intent to range across sounds and collaborators without the constraint of a unified project statement. The move was characteristic of Drake's approach to that era: permissive, boundary-crossing, and deliberately resistant to categorical placement. "Get It Together" emerged from that creative context as one of the project's most sonically distinctive tracks, built around an Afro-house framework that drew its character from its South African co-creator.

Black Coffee and the Sound of Johannesburg

The presence of Black Coffee, born Nkosinathi Innocent Maphumulo, distinguished "Get It Together" from anything else on More Life. By 2017, Black Coffee had established himself as one of the most significant figures in South African house music, with a production style that combined deep house textures with distinctive rhythmic elements from his home country's musical traditions. His contribution to the track gave it an atmospheric depth and a rhythmic sophistication that differed fundamentally from the trap and dancehall influences that dominated much of the rest of the playlist. The collaboration represented a genuine exchange between Drake's Toronto-anchored commercial hip-hop world and Black Coffee's Johannesburg-rooted electronic music scene. It was not a simple exoticization of an international sound but a meeting between two producers working at the top of their respective fields.

Jorja Smith's Breakthrough Moment

For Jorja Smith, a Walsall-born R&B and soul singer who had released her debut single in early 2016, the "Get It Together" feature came at a pivotal early career moment. Her voice, warm and controlled with a distinctively British inflection, provided the emotional center of the track, occupying the space above Black Coffee's production with a presence that matched its understated depth. The feature introduced Jorja Smith to an enormous global audience that would not have encountered her otherwise, and it arrived during a period when British R&B was asserting itself internationally through voices like hers. She would go on to release her debut album Lost and Found the following year, but for many listeners she arrived through "Get It Together."

Chart Reception and Commercial Context

The track debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 8, 2017, entering at number 45, its peak position, reflecting the concentrated streaming surge that accompanied the release of More Life. The following week it dropped to number 68 before exiting the chart, a two-week run that captured the initial excitement around the project rather than the slower organic growth of a conventional single. In the streaming era, playlist-style releases like More Life generate enormous debut-week numbers across all their tracks, with the audience's attention distributed broadly before settling on individual favorites. "Get It Together" benefited from that initial wave and found a dedicated audience among listeners who gravitated toward its more atmospheric, groove-oriented character within the broader project.

The Cross-Cultural Exchange

What "Get It Together" represents in retrospect is an early visible instance of the cross-continental dialogue between North American hip-hop and African electronic music that would become increasingly prominent in subsequent years. Drake's engagement with Afrobeats and African house sounds through this collaboration contributed to a broader mainstream awareness of those musical traditions in Western markets. The track sits at a cultural crossroads, connecting Walsall to Toronto to Johannesburg through a shared musical framework and producing something that belonged fully to none of those places individually. That kind of genuine synthesis is rarer than it looks and more valuable than a simple chart position can capture.

Find a good sound system and let "Get It Together" do what it was designed to do: move you, unhurriedly, through its carefully constructed atmosphere.

"Get It Together" — Drake Featuring Jorja Smith & Black Coffee's singular moment on the 2010s charts.