Photo by Pooneh Ghana
I used to be a Drake fan. Not so much in the mixtape days—that stuff always seemed self-evidently embarrassing—but something clicked on Thank Me Later, and I was completely sold. I was 23, just a couple months younger than Aubrey himself, and sort of corny in the way that most 23 year olds are. I felt like Drake "got" me: constantly vacillating between unjustifiable cockiness and self-loathing, obsessed with ideas about success and intimacy that I hadn’t necessarily experienced firsthand but could almost taste. I had a Skrillex haircut, an enthusiastic Blogspot, and made minimum wage at a Chinese fast food chain that was only marginally better than Panda Express. I was in need of some direction, and it felt good to be a part of something in real time, surfing the swelling wave of this obvious juggernaut. And then there was Take Care: still a masterpiece, if a bit exhausting from start to finish. I took "Marvin’s Room" as gospel; let she without a shattered iPhone 4S full of 3AM "are you drunk right now?" texts cast the first stone. I got a "Take Care" tattoo after a particularly messy breakup, a Drake move if there ever was one. I gazed into the abyss of millennial cliche, and the abyss gazed back.
Something began to shift over the last year, starting around "0-100" and crystallizing on If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late—either that, or I just became woke enough (or jaded enough) to call bullshit on the whole enterprise. The old Drake was an easy target, a feather-stuffed Big Ghostface punching bag, a proto-emo Seth Cohen type who’s totally not like those other guys. The new Drake’s triceps are cut like the Canadian Rockies, and his omg-so-random Twitter mode has been swapped for tough-guy roadman slang. The Sauvignon Blanc’s been replaced by soda dirty like Diana. It’s a lot harder to drunk-dial your exes when you’re in the crib with the phoooone off. But it’s not really about "soft" versus "hard," and it never was. It’s about Drake seriously positioning himself as the best rapper alive, and finally getting away with it.
-=-=-=-The most extreme manifestation of Drizzy’s mission to be top dog is his recent beef with Meek Mill, semi-frequent collaborator and boyfriend of Drake’s YMCMB labelmate and long-running crush Nicki Minaj. As you’re well aware unless you’ve been hiding in a wifi-less cave the past two weeks (in which case, is it chill if I join you?), Meek struck the first blow with a series of salty tweets accusing Drake of employing a ghostwriter. These accusations have since been proven at least somewhat true—reference tracks by a relatively unknown Atlanta rapper named Quentin Miller have begun to surface, and you have to imagine OVO’s subsequent defensive distractions would indicate there’s more where they came from—though most of the #DrakeHive seems pretty nonplussed about it. The climax came Monday night, when Drake closed out OVO Fest performing his recent diss tracks in front of mammoth projections of supposedly scathing Meek memes, crowd-sourced from amateur Twitter comedians and slobbering corporations eager to grind the biggest rap beef of the 2010s into Triple Whataburgers®. Forget your Dada outfit Photoshops and Wheelchair Jimmy jokes of yesteryear: Drake deploys the memes ‘round here these days, he’ll have you know!
And he won, of course—as much as anyone can "win" this Olympic exhibition of doing too much. Meek biffed this one, hard; "Wanna Know" was bafflingly toothless, and though any claims of his career being finished are delusional, it’s likely this is how most casual rap fans will remember him 10 years from now. But watching Drake frolic in front of Meek and Nicki memes in an Evil Knievel suit Monday night didn’t feel triumphant at all. Mind you, this is the guy who, in 2011, said the thing he feared most about his generation was the popularity of Tumblr: "Instead of kids going out and making their own moments, they’re just taking these images and living vicariously through other people’s moments." The same guy who declared, "Fuck going online, that ain’t part of my day" on "Energy" earlier this year. "Twitter isn’t real," he scoffed when I attended his CRWN interview with Elliott Wilson in 2013. "That’s a terrible medium to exist in." Frankly, he wasn’t wrong.
Yet here he was, holding court in front of a towering slideshow of aggregated content, pandering directly to the audience’s lowest-common-denominator cravings, cheered on by leering multinationals. Shirts printed with iPhone batteries, in homage to his wispy first diss track, were already for sale on site at the festival: if there’s one thing this beef has proved, it’s that Drake has content creation down to a science. "The Greatest Rapper of Our Generation," decreed Slurpee last month. (How to become a similar icon? Just download the 7-Eleven app and scan every time you buy a refreshing Slurpee at any of their 55,800 locations!) There’s currently a Sprite campaign featuring limited-run cans printed with lyrics from four rappers: Nas, Rakim, Biggie, and most prominently, Drizzy himself. "On a mission trying to shift the culture," goes one, quoting "Tuscan Leather". Three of the most revered rappers in the genre’s history, and a guy who may or may not write his own rhymes, who just performed in front of some unfunny memes to near-unanimous adulation. Selling soda. ("Obey your thirst" is basically the subtext of "Marvin’s Room", anyway.) If this is the voice of our generation, we are all fucking doomed.
But of course Drake found a way to make memes, our nation’s greatest pastime, feel lame and cynical. Drake is the fourth horseman guarding the gaping sinkhole at the end of the Internet. He is the delusional self-martyrdom of millennials, with a zesty twist of Boomers’ sociopathic greed. Drake is the corporate exec piggybacking off the sweat of impressionable youth with unpaid internships; you will be compensated in experience, though, and you can’t put a price tag on experience! (Unless you’re talking Experience Showers, in which case you’re going to need to speed that "10 bands, 50 bands" chant up a bit.) Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree got paid in "experience" for having her entire public persona reduced to a bratty footnote in a Drake song while she was engaged to someone else; ditto every woman whose personal phone conversations he’s sampled for his latest "deep" interlude. Are we ever going to talk about how deeply dubious Drake’s hallowed co-sign has revealed itself to be? Has it ever approached anything like genuine mentorship or long-term investment, or is he just ensuring breakout artists get remembered as "that guy with the Drake remix"? Where is OVO-signee Makonnen’s single, EP, anything? What happened to that Sauce Twinz collab he went out of his way to promise? Did this fucking guy really take Toronto unknown Ramriddlz completely off his own single, hook and all, and present it as a "remix"?
There was a distinct moment during the OVO Fest set where things immediately flipped from corny but ultimately harmless to legitimately toxic: an unfunny, badly-edited image of a bride and groom, with Nicki’s head edited onto the man and Meek’s onto the woman. (#DrakeHive could stand to take a few notes from #FutureHive in terms of quality meme production.) It was gross, but not out of place with the general thrust of Drake’s disses: "Is that a world tour, or your girl’s tour?", he sneered on "Back to Back", before hitting Nicki with some patronizing advice. The hilarious joke, you see, is that Nicki is more successful than Meek, and thus is like the dude in the relationship. That’s a new one! Never mind the delusional mental gymnastics required for a guy who built an empire off projections of sensitivity and simpering anecdotes refusing to let go of a single hook-up of the past decade to declare "No woman ever had me star-struck." Never mind the years of lyrical and visual receipts of Drake’s shameless, performative thirst for the woman who gets dragged for everything he gets dapped for. (Or the fact that Nicki will probably never be a serious factor in the "best rapper alive" conversation, despite being on the opposite end of the ghostwriting conversation.) On a strictly human level, I don’t even know how to rationally approach the subject of throwing a longtime friend under the bus on this scale, underhanded misogyny aside.
Drake is the chilling logical extreme of the beta male’s triumph over the last decade: the ultimate evolution of the nerd turned jock, forever working every angle of his underdog status that may or may not have ever been merited but certainly isn’t anymore. At first, the rise of the Sensitive Bro felt like a corrective to the stifling macho-ness of traditional masculinity. But it has failed spectacularly, and we are left with Gamergate, Ariel Pink, and the Voice of a Generation, who goes through women’s phones when they’re in the bathroom, firmly believes in the concept of the "friend zone" at almost 30 years old, and surrounds himself with powerful women to sniff their hair until they become a legitimate threat to his own ego. Even "Hotline Bling", an admittedly dope "Cha Cha" flip that sees Drake returning to his sultrier side, reeks of the jealous, slut-shamey entitlement and boring "good girl vs. bad girl" compartmentalizing that’s colored his supposedly vulnerable ballads for years. None of this is new, and I probably should have picked up on it circa "Marvin’s Room". (Remember when Drake’s ex, featured on the track’s intro, tried to sue him?) That’s the thing about charged-up "nice guys," though: their manipulative strategy is surprisingly effective, because you don’t want to see it coming. I’ve fallen for enough scheming, overcompensating nerds who’ve used hoarded knowledge and projected empathy to distract from their terrible personalities to say this with authority.
Drake using ghostwriters isn’t as black and white a matter of "good" or "bad," and it doesn’t discredit the very strong body of work he’s built up. I don’t think anyone is naive enough to assume that great music, on this massive a scale, is possible though without some degree of collaboration. But the issue here isn’t authenticity: it’s more about authority. The dissonance between what Drake claims to represent—an honest, relatable, complicated auteur who has propelled himself from the bottom-ish into the pantheon of GOATs and implores us to "know ourselves"—and who he seems to really be is at once surreal and frighteningly familiar. It’s about the banal sociopathy of late capitalism, brand over soul, a charming huckster playing an infinite shell game. It’s the triumph of content creation, analytics over everything, the numb acceptance of Sprite as our House of Medici. It’s about lying to yourself and the world for so long that you actually start to believe it. Maybe Drake is the ultimate millennial rapper. Look what we’ve done.