Canadian superstar Drake writes raps on BlackBerry

What do you use your BlackBerry for? Accessing email on the go? BBMing with friends? Good ‘ol fashioned phone calls? Check out how recording artist and actor Drake uses his favourite smartphone…

Can a smartphone serve as an artist’s canvas? You bet.

Just ask Toronto-based recording artist and actor, Drake (real name: Aubrey Drake Graham), who relied on his BlackBerry to write his rhymes and lyrics for his first studio album, Thank Me Later, which debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard 200 when it launched in June.

“I can’t write my raps on paper,” concedes Drake, while in the studio recording the tracks for the album. “The BlackBerry keys, my thumbs were made for touching them, ya know?” adds the 24-year-old, with a laugh, during a recent MTV interview.

Drake types a few more words into his BlackBerry and tests out the rhymes into the studio microphone: “How did I end up, right here, with you/After all the things, that I’ve, been through/It’s been one of those days, you try and forget about/Take a shot and let it out.”

Fans of Drake will immediately recognize these lyrics as part of the song, Show Me a Good Time.

A MTV News video has surfaced online, with Drake singing these words on his BlackBerry screen. “All of Drake’s raps, for eternity, have all been written inside of a BlackBerry,” confirms Noah “40” Shebib, Canadian hip-hop producer and engineer. “I mean [it’s] to the point where if he doesn’t have a BlackBerry, we gotta go get somebody who’s got one.”

“I’ve even had dummy BlackBerrys around to pull out for him to write on if he needs one,” he adds, who has produced for Drake, along with Alicia Keys, Lil Wayne and other stars.

Here’s a video of Drake and “40″ talking about BlackBerry and music creation:

Once reserved strictly as a business tool for mobile executives, its clear smartphones are increasingly being used for artistic expression.

Rocker guitarist Slash, of Guns n’ Roses and Velvet Revolver fame, says he wrote entire chapters of his autobiography, in which he co-authored, on his Blackberry.

Last year, New York-based artist Jorge Colombo used the Brushes app on his iPhone to create the cover of New Yorker magazine — while waiting in line at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, no less.

Nokia has also jumped on the bandwagon, announcing the filming of a new movie, The Commuter,
beginning in London this month, starring Pamela Anderson (Baywatch) and Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl) — and shot entirely on a Nokia N8 smartphone.

Now, I’ve written blog posts and longer-form articles on my BlackBerry before, but nothing this artistic! Sync readers, do you use your smartphone for creativity purposes? Photography? Drawing? Music composition? Video? Do tell!