In honor of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary year, we’re looking back at the top artists, songs, albums, and producers of “The Genius Era,” 2009 to the present.

Take Care was supposed to be the Album where Drake learned to stop worrying and love being the bomb. In the lead-up to that 2011 LP, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and won the Grammy for Best Rap Album, Drake said he was done looking back and feeling conflicted about fame. He’d gotten insanely rich by rapping and singing in his own inimitable style, and he was now able to buy houses for his friends and get his mom life-altering surgery. It was time to savor the moment and quit dwelling on all of the relationships he’d mucked up along the way.

That didn’t quite happen. On songs like “Marvins Room” and “HYFR,” Drake makes the classic Drake mistake of getting in his feelings and hollering at exes. Take Care is a terrific album, but it’s not exactly the victory lap he intended. His follow-up, Nothing Was the Same—the blockbuster that makes Drake the top hip-hop artist of 2013 on Genius according to pageviews—was again designed to be a farewell to the velvet-rope moping that had defined much of the Canadian singer-rapper’s career up to this point.

“Take Care was about connecting with my city and connecting with my past and sort of still feeling guilty that I’m not in love with one of these girls that cared about me from back in the day,” Drake told XXL a few months before Nothing Was the Same arrived in September 2013. “Now, I’m 26, I’m with my friends, I’m making jobs for people, I’m making memories for people that will last a lifetime. I don’t need to be in love right now. I don’t need these things that I maybe once thought that I needed to feel normal and feel righteous about myself. I think for the first time in an album I’m content—not satisfied—but proud of where I’m at as a person.”

That contentedness manifests itself as cold confidence throughout Nothing Was the Same. Midway through the first verse on opener “Tuscan Leather,” named for a fancy Tom Ford cologne that supposedly smells like cocaine, a triumphant Drizzy compares himself to both an NBA all-star and Eddie Murphy’s regal lead character from the 1988 film Coming to America.

I reached the point where don’t shit matter to me, nigga
I reached heights that Dwight Howard couldn’t reach, nigga
Prince Akeem, they throw flowers at my feet, nigga
I could go a hour on this beat, nigga

Later in the song, he even boasts about having dinner with childhood crush Tatyana Ali, the actress who played Ashley Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

The fresh prince, just had dinner with Tatyana, no lie
All these ’90s fantasies on my mind
The difference is that with mine, they all come true in due time

Speaking of ’90s fantasies, Drake samples the 1997 Wu-Tang Clan single “It’s Yourz” on “Wu-Tang Forever,” a song that’s basically about how he’s getting everything he wants. The mood in the chorus isn’t ecstatic, but Drake sounds steely and self-assured as he proclaims himself the king of the rap game—a notable boast in a year that also saw high-profile releases by JAY-Z and Kanye West.

Young nigga came through on his Wu-Tang
And nowadays when I ask about who got it
They say it’s yours, nobody else’s
Yeah, this shit belong to nobody
It’s yours, nobody else’s

In an interview with XXL, Drake stopped short of saying he was underwhelmed by Kanye’s Yeezus and Jay’s Magna Carta Holy Grail. But he admitted that both projects inspired him to push harder and release the best album possible—perhaps because he could smell blood in the water and sense the opportunity before him. (For what it’s worth, Ye and Hov are the fourth and fifth biggest rappers of 2013 according to Genius pageviews.)

“I remember coming into this year thinking, ‘How am I going to cut through all these people and shine? I’ve never been part of a year when so many legends are dropping projects. How am I going to be seen? I’m going to be like the kid waving in the background in the photo with all of his tall relatives,’” Drake said. “And, I guess, those were my initial thoughts, and not to say that I haven’t enjoyed some of the stuff that has come out this year, but it didn’t pan out the way I thought it was going to. I think I am going for it, to really establish what are murmurs or things being said quietly, ‘Um, I think that Drake might actually…’”

Drake did actually. Nothing Was the Same debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, spawned a pair of Top 10 pop singles (the celebratory “Started from the Bottom” and the irresistible “Hold On, We’re Going Home”) and earned another Best Rap Album nomination.

This time, the Grammy infamously went to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and Macklemore made headlines for texting Kendrick Lamar, who was nominated for good kid m.A.A.d city, an apology (“I robbed you”), then posting a screenshot of the exchange on social media. Drake dubbed Macklemore’s text “wack as fuck,” and of course, he took issue with being left out of the conversation. “To name just Kendrick? That shit made me feel funny,” Drake said. “No, in that case, you robbed everybody. We all need text messages!”

The future would bring more Grammy controversies for Drake—and more giant albums that would have Genius readers pouring over his lyrics. We’ll see him in a couple more of these retrospective articles.