It was NYE 2013, about four years after Kanye's boast, and two of the big competing end-of-year shows on South Beach were Drake at the Fontainebleau poolside and Future at Cameo.

One could make a flow chart where the cybernetic depression of 808s and Heartbreak (obvs following T-Pain's Epiphany) splits off into two camps: the navel base, where Drake is stationed to gaze eternally, and an alien(ated) satellite, where Future roams the galaxies like the Silver Surfer. Now, where Drake takes Kanye's ugly, late-night phone call further up its own ass, Future goes cosmic, seeing that the pain is communal and searching for solutions in the stars before just starting a colony on Pluto.

My first thoughts when I read about it were that Drake would ring in the new year by filling up a drained Fontainebleau pool tear by tear, after which Future would walk on those tears and turn that saltwater into wine, especially since Future's You Deserve It (#YDI) is like an earned, pragmatic response to the reckless indulgence of Drake's YOLO. But Future weeps too.

Earlier this year, on Gucci Mane's "Fawk the World," Future took one of Watch the Throne's more salient points, balling as a coping mechanism for escaping death in poverty, and distilled it into one heart-stopping verse, recounting an uncle's drug-related death, a cousin's suicide, and a friend's jail sentence before declaring "I just had to drop 40 racks up on my ring." Thus, familial despair and material excess at the same damn, perfectly justifiable time.

While waiting for Future to go on, there was lots to look at 'round the club. Saloon chandeliers hanging over neon zags like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride dropped into Tron. The emptied bag on the ceiling, once filled with balloons, dangling over some stripper poles. Some girls at the bar rapping along, "It ain't fun if the homies can't have none," before taking the dance floor to E-40's "Function."