Maybe we’re not getting an official release after all…
Drake has re-uploaded his FOMO mixtape that premiered earlier this week and featured his much-anticipated remix of Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” – but with one notable change.
The rapper went viral for blasting the song in Houston at a nightclub while DJ’ing an event in July, and Ella took to TikTok in response to post a video of her lip-syncing Drake’s legendary collab with Lil Wayne, “HYFR (Hell Ya F***ing Right),” which contains the George Strait reference, “All my exes live in Texas like I’m George Strait.”
Drake then took to Langley’s comment section almost immediately, complimenting her songwriting with the simple comment, “Goated Pen.”
Just a week later, on August 22nd, he was spotted jamming out to “Choosin’ Texas” next to Langley’s opener, Ernest, during her show in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the Simmons Bank Arena.
A few days after the show, Langley would also upload a photo of herself chatting with the rapper in a photo dump on Instagram.
Well amid plenty of speculation that a “Choosin’ Texas” remix was coming, Drake finally unveiled his version during a livestream premiere for his new Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) mixtape earlier this week.
The song has yet to be released on streaming, and after the livestream it ended the video was set to “private,” though plenty of fans managed to capture it and share it all over social media and YouTube.
As you can probably imagine, his version of “Choosin’ Texas,” which also features rapper Don Toliver, is a far cry from Langley’s original:
“She’s from Texas, I can tell by the way she grip on my wood grain,
She’s down to take a hundred shots with me and talk about my pain,
It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see,
A cowgirl ends up riding off on me,
Drinkin’ yak all by myself,
She’s from Texas, I can tell, baby”
The video originally featured footage of Drake and Ella chatting it up backstage. But the rapper re-uploaded his mixtape on Thursday, and fans on his Reddit quickly noticed that Ella had been removed from the video for “Choosin’ Texas.”
Here’s the original version, featuring the video of Drake chatting with Ella:
And here’s the edited version that removed the footage of Ella. (“Choosin’ Texas” starts at the 40:38 mark).
So what’s going on? Many in the Drake subreddit speculated that it had to do with label politics, and that the removal of Ella means that the song won’t get an official release. And honestly, that wouldn’t surprise me: Ella is set to break Mariah Carey’s record if “Choosin’ Texas” spends another week at #1 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 chart, and record labels are notoriously sensitive about anything that they think could hurt a song on the charts. It wouldn’t surprise me if they aren’t happy that the song dropped the week before “Choosin’ Texas” goes for the record.
At this point, neither Ella nor her label have commented on the remix, and Drake hasn’t commented on the changes made to the video. But the whole thing also comes just a couple weeks after country parody artist Cledus T. Judd revealed that Ella’s label asked him to remove his video for “Meet Her,” his parody of Ella’s song “Meet Her.”
It certainly seems like the label is hyper-sensitive to anything that could even theoretically hurt the massive momentum that Ella has right now. Whether that’s fair or not is obviously up for debate: It could be argued that anything that keeps her name in the zeitgeist is good for her career, but that’s obviously not how labels think as they try to carefully curate everything surrounding an artist’s music and image.
We’ll have to see whether Drake’s remix ever gets an official release. But if he’s already removing her from the video, it doesn’t seem to be looking good.
