On Thursday morning, Drake released "Pop Style," a collaboration with The Throne, better known to most as Jay Z and Kanye West. At one point, Kanye says: I just, I just, I just, I just wanna rock your body/ Take you to the garage and do some karate. The second part is easily identifiable to a certain type of cinephile—it's a reference to the 2008 comedy Step Brothers starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.
Curiously this isn't even the first time (or second!) that Kanye has referenced the film. On "See Me Now," a bonus track on 2010's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye raps First of all, we all know the beats is/ Like a mix between Fergie and Jesus, which paraphrases a scene where Ferrell sings Bonnie Raitt's "Let's Give Em Something To Talk About."
Kanye's love for the film goes deeper than just two stray lyrics though. In 2014—a full six years after the movie came out—he sat down with GQ shortly after being married to Kim Kardashian in Italy to talk about his nascent footwear dreams and his recent nuptials. To better explain why he decided to tie the knot, he employed the use of a line from Step Brothers’ emotional climax:
"Like they said in Step Brothers: ‘Never lose your dinosaur.’ This is the ultimate example of a person never losing his dinosaur. Meaning that even as I grew in cultural awareness and respect and was put higher in the class system in some way for being this musician, I never lost my dinosaur.
"Kim is this girl who fucking turns me on. I love her. This is who I want to be next to and be around. And then people would try to say, ‘Well, you know, if you’re a musician, you should be with a musician, and if you want to design, you need to be with a girl from the design world.’ I don’t give a fuck about people’s opinions. Because when a kid falls in love with an airplane or a bike or a dinosaur especially if you’re an only child and it’s not because of the book that the sibling was reading it’s like, fuck, you mean to tell me that the dinosaurs walked the earth and stuff like that?! That’s amazing! You mean to tell me that these giant multi-ton crafts can fly that fast and that loud, and they can flip, and there’s danger, the possibility of them exploding? That’s fucking cool! You mean to tell me that this girl with this fucking body and this face is also into style, and she’s a nice person, and she has her own money and is family-oriented? That’s just as cool as a fucking fighter jet or dinosaur! And just as rarely seen."
It's not just Step Brothers that Kanye loves, but the whole Will Ferrell oeuvre. "Niggas In Paris" from Watch the Throne kicks off with a Ferrell sample: "We're gonna skate to one song, and one song only." Kanye hasn't mentioned Anchorman in song yet, but he starred in Anchorman 2.
In February, just after the release of Zoolander 2, Kanye meditated on the career of his favorite actor, tweeting, "Will Ferrell has reached walking living breathing god status. His existence is a blessing. Perhaps it was seeing him play the same character from 15 years ago with 15 more years experience. That showed how sharp and Bruce Lee status he is. We all know Will Ferrell has always been the one!!!"
To the best of our knowledge, Kanye West has never publicly acknowledged Ferrell's frequent collaborator John C. Reilly—so this whole Step Brothers thing could really be an extension of his broad Ferrell love.
