walking upstream…
Tory Lanez
photo: the come up show · cc by 2.0 ↗Tory Lanez
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Born Daystar Peterson in Toronto, Tory Lanez lost his mother at 11 and spent his teens homeless, learning from his preacher father that "words are so powerful" they could carry an audience the way a sermon carried a congregation. He built a career on that conviction, flipping 2000s R&B into his own genre-blurring "Swavey" sound across the Chixtape mixtape series until singing and rapping blurred into one style. His commercial peak arrived with 2016's "Luv" and the platinum I Told You, before 2021's synth-drenched Alone at Prom recast him as 1980s alter ego Ashton Rain, chasing the decade of music that raised him.
the sound in question
2016
LuvTory Lanez
walk the tributaries ↓
Chris Brown2000s–10s · R&B / Pop / Hip hop
There's no quote of Lanez calling Brown formative, but the debt shows up in the work: on 2019's Chixtape 5, built from "favorite records" that "played a big part of my childhood," he told Variety, "The Take" rebuilds Brown's own 2007 hit "Take You Down" around its original hook and vocal sample, with Brown himself dropping in to trade verses. In 2022 Lanez gifted Brown a chain reading "KING OF POP... OF MY ERA," writing on Instagram that his friend "held me down in a time when most of the world left me for dead."
listen: upstream & here
2007
Take You DownChris Brown
2019
The TakeTory Lanez
listen forThe same slow, grinding mid-tempo pocket and falsetto-topped hook carry over from the original into the flip — listen for how Lanez lets the hook's melody do the seducing rather than reaching for a rap cadence, right up until Brown's own voice returns to trade bars over the sample of his own record.
Michael Jackson1980s · Pop / R&B / Funk
When Lanez built his 1980s alter ego Ashton Rain for 2021's Alone at Prom, he named his touchstones in one breath — "a mixture of Hall & Oates, Toto, Michael Jackson, Rick James, and more," he told AllHipHop — but it's what he did months later that makes Jackson's presence concrete: the video for "SKAT," his duet with DaBaby, closes with what one outlet called "a full on remake of the legendary dance breakdown from Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' video."
listen: upstream & here
1982
ThrillerMichael Jackson
2021
SKATTory Lanez
listen for"Thriller" is built around its own theatrical break — group choreography snapping into formation mid-song — and "SKAT" borrows that exact structural move, staging its own dancers into the same zombie-breakdown shapes rather than just quoting the song's sound.
Drake2010s · Hip hop / Contemporary R&B / Pop rap
Asked by HipHopDX whether Toronto's melodic rap-and-sing hybrid "starts with Drake," Lanez didn't deflect: "I feel like Drake happened to be one of the dudes that paved that sound... I feel like he's helped me piece my sound together, and I feel like subconsciously, as an artist, you're gonna take certain things from what you hear on a day-to-day basis." It's the most direct sound-shaping credit Lanez has given any artist on record — no cover or sample links the two, only that scene-level debt.
listen: upstream & here
2011
Marvin's RoomDrake
2015
Henny In HandTory Lanez
listen forBoth tracks ride the same late-night, half-sung half-rapped hybrid Lanez is describing — a hushed, conversational delivery that drifts between melody and bars over spare, moody production, rather than committing fully to either a rap cadence or a sung hook.