The 2010s File Feature
Own It
Own It — Drake (2013) "Own It" appears on Nothing Was the Same , Drake's third studio album, released in September 2013 through his OVO Sound imprint in part…
01 The Story
Own It — Drake (2013)
"Own It" appears on Nothing Was the Same, Drake's third studio album, released in September 2013 through his OVO Sound imprint in partnership with Young Money Entertainment and Cash Money Records. The album was one of the most anticipated releases in hip-hop of that year, arriving at a moment when Drake had established himself as one of the central figures in contemporary rap and R&B, a position he had built through his distinctive combination of introspective lyrical content, melodic vocal performance, and sophisticated production instincts.
Nothing Was the Same was produced primarily by Noah "40" Shebib, Drake's primary collaborator and the architect of the muted, atmospheric sound that had become the sonic signature of the OVO aesthetic. Shebib's production on the album built on the template established by Take Care (2011), which had won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album, but pushed further toward a spare, introspective sound that stripped away some of the more conventional hip-hop production elements in favor of space, mood, and emotional texture.
"Own It" is one of the album's more understated tracks, a slow-burning meditation that sits in the territory between hip-hop and R&B that Drake had made his characteristic home. The production is minimal in a deliberate way, with bass and sparse melodic elements creating an atmosphere of night-time introspection. Shebib's approach to the track is very much in line with the album's overall aesthetic: atmosphere over spectacle, emotional precision over bombast, with production choices that served the intimacy of the lyrical content.
The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, selling more than 658,000 copies in its first week, a figure that confirmed Drake's position among the very highest tier of commercially active recording artists. The commercial performance of Nothing Was the Same was a continuation of the trajectory established by Take Care, and it demonstrated that the OVO Sound approach, however unconventional by hip-hop production standards of the era, connected with a massive audience. The album received extensive critical attention, with many reviewers identifying it as a further development of Drake's distinctive artistic voice.
"Own It" functions within the album as one of several tracks that deal with romantic relationships through the lens of vulnerability, longing, and emotional honesty that was central to Drake's artistic persona. Drake had become one of the most prominent male voices in popular music to engage with emotional complexity and romantic vulnerability without the defensiveness or bravado that characterized more conventional hip-hop approaches to these subjects, and "Own It" exemplified this approach in a context that was appropriately intimate given its production.
The song received significant attention from the album's core audience and was among the tracks most frequently cited by listeners in discussions of the album's emotional highlights. While several other tracks on Nothing Was the Same were more prominently promoted as singles, "Own It" developed a following through album listening that reflected the way Drake's audience had learned to engage with his records, not just as collections of singles but as cohesive bodies of work that rewarded deep listening.
The OVO Sound aesthetic that Shebib developed across the Drake albums of this period became enormously influential on subsequent hip-hop and R&B production. The spare, moody, emotionally oriented production style that characterizes "Own It" can be heard across a significant portion of the mid-2010s rap and R&B landscape, in the work of producers and artists who processed and extended the sonic vocabulary that OVO established. In this sense, the track is both a product of a specific moment and a document of an influence that extended well beyond its original context.
Nothing Was the Same was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rap Album, and while it did not win, the nominations cycle reinforced the critical recognition that Drake had earned as one of the most significant artists in contemporary music. "Own It" contributed to the emotional texture of an album that many observers regarded as his most fully realized artistic statement to that point, a record in which the commercial and the personal were held in the kind of productive tension that generates genuinely lasting work.
In the broader context of 2013 hip-hop, the track represents Drake's particular intervention in the genre: a demonstration that hip-hop could sustain emotional complexity, self-examination, and vulnerability alongside the confidence and technical skill that the format had always required. The song is a quiet but characteristic illustration of how he redefined what was possible for a commercially dominant hip-hop artist to express publicly.
02 Song Meaning
Meaning and Themes: Own It — Drake
"Own It" is a song that operates in the territory Drake had made distinctively his own by the time of Nothing Was the Same: the intersection of romantic desire, emotional honesty, and the complications that arise when a highly self-aware person tries to navigate intimate connection. The song's title functions as both a directive and a question, as the concept of ownership in the context of a romantic relationship carries multiple implications that the track explores with characteristic subtlety.
At its surface level, the song addresses a partner and the question of whether that partner is willing to commit fully to the relationship, to own what they have together rather than maintaining emotional distance or ambivalence. The narrator positions himself as ready for this commitment while suggesting that the other person may be holding back. This dynamic, in which emotional vulnerability is extended and its reciprocation is uncertain, is one of the central preoccupations of Drake's romantic songwriting.
Drake's treatment of this material reflects his broader artistic project of presenting emotional complexity and romantic vulnerability as acceptable and even admirable qualities in a male voice. Hip-hop's conventions around masculinity had historically made this kind of openness difficult to express; Drake's commercial success demonstrated that an audience existed for it, and in doing so he expanded the emotional range of what hip-hop could contain. "Own It" is an example of this expansion, presenting emotional neediness and longing not as weakness but as honest acknowledgment of what intimacy requires.
The production environment created by Noah "40" Shebib serves the emotional content in important ways. The sparse, late-night atmosphere of the track creates a sense of isolation that mirrors the narrator's emotional position: the moment of reaching out to another person across a gap of uncertainty is a lonely one, and the production makes that loneliness felt without dramatizing it. The restraint of the musical setting forces the emotional content of the performance to do its work without the support of bombastic production elements.
The song also engages with the question of what it means to take ownership of an emotional situation, to stop performing ambivalence or cool detachment and acknowledge what one actually feels and wants. This willingness to be accountable for one's own emotional reality, rather than deflecting it through irony or bravado, was one of the qualities that defined Drake's persona during this period and that his audience responded to with particular intensity. The song's implicit argument is that genuine connection requires this kind of accountability from both people, and the narrator's uncertainty about whether his partner shares this willingness gives the track its tension.
The placement of "Own It" within the arc of Nothing Was the Same is significant. The album moves through various emotional registers, from confidence and celebration to introspection and longing, and "Own It" occupies the more vulnerable, uncertain end of this spectrum. Tracks like this one give the album its emotional complexity, preventing it from settling into either pure celebration or pure melancholy and insisting on the messy, ambivalent reality of romantic experience as Drake understood and expressed it.
For listeners who followed Drake's work closely, "Own It" was one of the tracks that demonstrated his capacity for emotional precision, the ability to locate and name a specific emotional situation with enough accuracy that listeners recognized their own experience in the description. This quality of emotional recognition is the foundation of his connection with his audience, and the song remains one of the more concentrated examples of it in his catalog from this productive and critically significant period.
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