Tom Green has gone public with his wish to hang out with a certain fellow Canadian who followed in his hip hop footsteps.
The 47-year-old comedian – once a member of rap group Organized Rhyme – has released “I Wanna Be Friends With Drake.”
“Drake, let’s be homies / I could be down with your crew / I know you come from Canada / Well, I’m from Canada, too,” Green sings on the track.
“I been a fan since Degrassi / I was in college at the time / Now, I’m just down the hill in Hollywood / And you’re gonna be a friend of mine.”
It’s not impossible that a six-year-old Aubrey Drake Graham was inspired to become a rapper after seeing Green, as MC Bones in Organized Rhyme, enjoy success with 1992’s “Check the O.R.” It was named Best Rap Video at what are now the iHeartRadio MMVAs and was nominated as Best Rap Recording at the Juno Awards (a category Drake didn’t win until 2010!).
In 2016, Green took to Twitter to appeal to Drake to "help a Canadian rapper out" and retweet a link to his "Do The Donald" video. Green was also captured on video in 2017 doing Drake's "Hotline Bling" during a stand-up show.
Green's interest in rap and electronic music goes back to his years growing up in an Ottawa suburb.
“I started sampling and looping old funk and R&B and jazz breaks from musical legends of the 1970s,” he recalled, in a message online. “I would take the looped beats and bass-lines and drop raps over them in my home studio.”
“I Wanna Be Friends With Drake” is included on The Tom Green Show, an album out on vinyl on May 17 that includes audio clips from his stand-up act and eponymous TV show as well as a collection of “some funny songs and some sincere ones.”
The video for “I Wanna Be Friends With Drake,” directed by Tom Corella, evokes Green’s before-its-time TV series, on which he frequently interacted with strangers on the street. Check it out below:
Disclosure: John R. Kennedy and Tom Green have known each other since the mid-'80s.