Yall Got About Four Days to Wrap This Up
Yall Got About Four Days to Wrap This Up
An exhaustive (and exhausting) timeline of Drake versus everybody.
Tomorrow on Hung Up: Tree Paine and “Tortured Poets.”
It’s Drake versus Rick Ross, but also Drake versus Future and Metro Boomin, and still Drake versus Kendrick, and forever J.Cole versus any strain of cleverness or intrigue. Men have united to form the Avengers of Hating Drake; Drake, in response, has doubled down. If you are too busy to keep up with all the rap men happenings, I have collected the details for you.
A Beyoncé album came out last month and a Taylor Swift album is due tomorrow1, if you haven’t already listened to the leak. (I haven’t!) What I’m saying is this, in the most tired mom sense of the voice, the most don’t-run-in-my-house Auntie voice, the now-I-know-why-my-mom-would-just-sit-in-her-room-with-the-door-closed expression on my face: y’all got about four days to wrap this up. Monday is the deadline; I should not wake up next week to a post from Complex dot com. We have been through weeks of this. My patience has been exhausted, figure it out.
October 6, 2023: Drake and J. Cole release “First Person Shooter.” J.Cole declares himself, Drake, and Kendrick Lamar as rap’s “Big Three2.”
March 22, 2024: Future and Metro Boomin release their joint project “We Don't Trust You.” On the track “Like That,” Kendrick lights up Drake and Kendrick, but mostly Drake. “Your best work is a light pack / Nigga, Prince outlived Mike Jack / Nigga, bum, ‘fore all your dogs get buried / That’s a K with all these nines, he gon’ see Pet Sematary.”
March 24: What actually goes on in a Drake concert in this day and age? I honestly have no idea. I’m imagining it as Oprah’s Live Your Best Life weekend but Drake walks around in a bullet proof vest talking about a man’s right to split the check? I don’t know.
Anyway.
In the immediate aftermath of “Like That” Drake does his best Oprah-aha-moment: “A lot of people asked me how I’m feeling,” Drake said onstage at the Sunrise, Florida, stop on the Big As the What? tour. “The way I’m feeling is the same way I want you to walk out here feeling tonight, about your fucking self. ’Cause you know how I’m feeling? I got my fucking head up high, my back straight, I’m ten fucking toes down in Florida, or anywhere else I go. I know that no matter what, it’s not a nigga on this earth that could ever fuck with me on my life, and that’s how I want you to walk out of here tonight!” I highly recommend clicking that link and watching the video. Drake is looking at himself in the mirror saying “You is kind, you is smart, you is important.”
Rumors begin to circulate that Drake and Future fell out over a woman.
April 5: J.Cole surprise releases a mixtape “Might Delete Later.” On the last track, “7 Minute Drill,” Cole takes aim at Kendrick Lamar. “”
“Your first shit3 was classic, your last shit4 was tragic / Your second shit5 put niggas to sleep, but they gassed it / Your third shit6 was massive and that was your prime,” Cole posits. “Well, he caught me at the perfect time, jump up and see / Boy, I got here off of bars, not no controversy / Funny thing about it, bitch, I don't even want the prestige / Fuck the Grammys 'cause them crackers ain't never done nothin' for me, ho.”
April 7: He said he “Might Delete Later,” and he did. Onstage at his annual Dreamville Festival, Cole says he regrets “7 Minute Drill.” “I’m so proud of [“Might Delete Later”], except for one part. It’s one part of that shit that make me feel like, man, that’s the lamest shit I ever did in my fucking life, right?” Cole said. He was conflicted about responding to Kendrick Lamar’s “Like That” verse, he says, but he felt a lot of pressure to react. “I know how I feel about my peers, these two niggas that I just been blessed to even stand beside in this game, let alone chase their greatness, right? So, I felt conflicted ’cause I’m like, bruh, I know I don’t really feel no way. But the world wanna see blood!” Does anyone think “7 Minute Drill” drew blood? That was like the pinprick Elizabeth Holmes promised. Not even Cole thinks so!
April 12: Future and Metro Boomin release another joint album, “We Really Don’t Trust You.” They double down, with assists from A$AP Rocky7 and The Weeknd. On “All To Myself” the erstwhile Tedros references not signing to Drake’s OVO: “They could never diss my brothers, baby/When they got leaks in they operation/I thank God that I never signed my life away.” This song is not very good, but it amuses me. You have to be on some other shit to use an Isley Brother’s falsetto to fuss with your ex-friend.
“I smash before you birthed, son, Flacko hit it first, son,” Rocky raps, implying that he slept with Sophie Brussaux before she had a baby with Drake. (It’s rumored that it wasn’t Kanye who told Pusha T about Adonis, but A$AP.)
Also on April 12: J.Cole removes “7 Minute Drill” from streaming services.
April 13: After many days of not directly responding to the drama, Drake teases that he will respond to the drama, and finally does respond to the drama.
A longer and a shorter version of “Push Ups (Drop & Give Me Fifty),” Drake’s presumed response to everyone, leaks online. (There was some debate as to whether the song was AI-generated; Drake later let Akademics premiere a mastered version.)
In the song, Drake addresses Kendrick, Rick Ross, Future, The Weeknd, and Metro Boomin directly. The Swifties, and by extension Taylor Swift, and Maroon 5 kind of catch strays. He also clarifies who is on his side: SZA, Travis Scott, and his “Her Loss” partner 21 Savage.
The diss boats many of Drake’s accomplishments. Despite his uneven output (and interesting diversions), he remains one of the most successful musicians in history and one of the top musician of the streaming era. But he also described himself as “lighskinned but I’m still a dark nigga” that one time, which I personally will never get over. Anyway. The best, or most controversial, lines:
“How the fuck you big steppin' with a size seven men's on?” Kendrick Lamar’s most recent album was titled “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.”
“Maroon 5 need a verse, you better make it witty Then we need a verse for the Swifties” Kendrick Lamar contributed a verse to the Maroon 5 song “Don't Wanna Know” and to Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” remix.8
“I'm at the top of the mountain, so you tight now Just to have this talk with your ass, I had to hike down” Re: Kendrick. I don’t know why, but this one gave me a good chuckle.
“I might take your latest girl and cuff her like I'm Ricky/ Can't believe he jumpin' in, this nigga turnin' fifty / Every song that made it on the chart, he got from Drizzy / Spend that lil' check you got and stay up out my business.” The most successful of Rick Ross’s appearances on the Billboard Top 100 chart have featured Drake. And Rick Ross just turned 48 in January.
Notably, Drake says that all of this drama predated Kendrick’s verse on “Like That.” “And that fuckin' song y'all got did not start the beef with us/This shit been brewin' in a pot, now I'm heatin' up/I don't care what Cole think, that Dot shit was weak as fuck,” he rapped.
I kind of like this diss to be honest. It’s the first time Drake has seemed … awake? Excited? On-air? Not being a loser? in quite some time.
Also on April 13: Rick Ross responds to Drake’s diss with a flurry of memes and a diss track of his own: “Champagne Moments.”
Ross gets his licks in: Drake uses ghostwriters, he’s biracial, he grew up comfortably middle class, he used other rappers for clout when he was dinged for being too “soft.” None of those jabs are necessarily new, so they don’t impress me much.
But then he goes a bit deeper: Drake got his body done, he contoured on those abs.
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