The Definitive Guide to Hating Drake

It has been a terrible time for hate.

It’s impossible to understate the cruel and devastating impact of the resurgence of Nazis, racism and bigotry running rampant fearlessly in America, in broad daylight, on January 6th, Florida, the Roberts Supreme Court, all over the place. Hate crimes, unlawful murder of citizens, disenfranchisement of the oppressed, literal genocide no one can agree on, it’s a rough and terrifying era.

There used to be a possibility that someone even making an offensive joke did not intend to hurt real people in their pursuit of a brazen laugh. Now they no longer even pretend to be jokes, just thinly veiled statements of sociopathic prejudice; standups like Dave Chappelle have become exhausting martyrs complaining about the sacrifices they have to make for the entertainment they refuse to provide anyway. Everyone’s on edge and half of them have a good reason. (The other half is triggered by, like, rainbows.) Things are so unfun it can feel incredulous to even try and laugh at something. There is one grand exception to this. It always feels good to laugh at Drake.

There was only a very small window when it was not a good idea to hate Drake. When Aubrey Graham first emerged in the pop landscape, he was somewhat of an antidote to the testosterone overkill in hip-hop orthodoxy. So was Kanye, if you can believe that! His famous 2007 chart victory over 50 Cent reduced the archetypal GOAT from a musclebound robber to a horny backpack nerd, a start! Then, inspired by the Auto-Tuned landmark 808s and Heartbreak, Drake defanged this model even further and became the fastest-rising singer of rap ever. Drake charted higher than Cee-Lo, stuck to it more consistently than Andre 3000, and lasted longer than Lauryn Hill. And he wasn’t trying to be arty like his chief inspiration. He was trying to make hits.

So as Kanye got weirder, to the point of estrangement from reality, Drake somehow became rap’s new normal. He’s been the center of it for so long it’s hard to remember a time beforehand. (This is probably a good place to mention that if you didn’t already know, only Taylor Swift stands in the way of Drake being the most streamed artist, period.) But that time existed, and while he didn’t blow my mind, it says something about rap’s toxic masculinity problem that Aubrey Graham was initially considered a fresh and emotionally vulnerable antidote. I still don’t quite understand why he was considered a rapper who sang and not an R&B singer who rapped, but even I can’t deny that no figure in pop history, not even Mariah Carey, did more to tear down the wall between those two kinds of vocalists. Hip-hop officially became fair game for melodies by dudes expressing their feelings. And as someone who caught Drake with my personal GOAT Lil Wayne at Forest Hills in 2013, believe you me: He brought the women. More than I’ve ever seen at a rap event in my life. I only started to understand his appeal that night, as his stage charisma admittedly upstaged the best rapper alive.

But I wasn’t sold that this was some new frontier of maturity and inner expression for hip-hop. This man was rapping about drunk-dialing women who left him, regardless of whether they’d moved on with someone else. Condescending to anyone he perceived to have wronged him, rarely appearing to examine his own role in whatever happened. Trying to pass off manipulation and passive-aggressiveness as sensitivity. I’d seen this before. This was emo. Rap was about to get real whiny and self-pitying. It did.

 

VIDEO: Drake “Hold On, We’re Going Home”

I’m not surprised that Drake ended up making plenty of music I’ve enjoyed, even loved: “Take Care,” “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” “I’m on One,” a whole lot of More Life. That’s your fucking job when you’re a record-shattering pop phenom. I’m also not surprised that, like Ms. Swift or Elvis before them, Drake’s continued to maximize his success by clogging every vein of the industry. Endless features, cosigns, loosies, “mixtapes” that reach number one like albums, multiple algorithm-suffocating releases per year featuring upwards of 20 tracks and over 80 minutes long. Yet he’s managed to make it all work, at least for his image. The shamelessness is his brand. The overkill is his brand. The nonstop never-shutting-up, never-going-dark, never-giving-us-or-his-exes-a-break is his brand. Everything is Drake. For over 15 long fucking years now.

As someone who already felt sick of Drake when I didn’t have a good reason, unless opening his proper debut album with a six-minute song about fireworks counts, I’m extremely weary of him now, to the point where I have Stockholm syndrome. I bought Take Care cheap with my employee discount at Tunes because it felt like a dishonest gap in my collection. I allow him to consume and booby-trap my mind with the same trolls and provocations even though my feelings haven’t changed about his overall vibe (bad, corny, pathetic) in 15 years that are almost impressive in their stuntedness. He’s become a father (more on that in a bit) but he hasn’t grown up. Drake still treats the world like it dumped him.

One of his hooks literally goes, “I’m too good to you.” In fact, his trolliest moments have their moments; I’m partial to “From Time,” where Jhene Aiko actually soothes him with “I love me enough for the both of us” and then(!) “I know you’ve been through more than most of us.” I guess the sheer audacity steamrolls me. And don’t tell Brand New I also found devilish invention in “I group DM my exes” and “I gave someone else your nickname.” But those are just a couple lines on an 81-minute album, one even his stans don’t particularly love but streamed it to the top of the Billboard 200 anyway. They usually do, and we’re almost coming up on a decade now since he made an album that anyone outside of his cult also agreed was great (I guess heads liked Her Loss because he was rapping again after he bombed as a tepid house diva on Honestly, Nevermind). But he, they, and this whole out-of-control system persists.

 

 

I’ve long refused to believe that this low level of enthusiasm does such astronomical numbers. And he’s such a petty little Elon type that I know he would buy up all the Russian eggs to artificially inflate his Spotify numbers if he knew how. I can’t prove it, but I believe he has, and does. In the off-chance I’m wrong, he still would if he could. You will not convince me that Drake wouldn’t do anything to win at any cost. He is the sore loser incarnate. He Trojan-horsed his way into the hearts of America with false modesty, acting credentials, memes, gossip, the whole classic showbiz arsenal and plenty of untested new shit he was an early adopter of. And I knew I was on the right side of history when not one, but two, of the all-time greatest rappers, decided they had enough of his ass and tried their best to take him down.

God bless Pusha T. The absolute coolest. Somehow that sharp-tongued cackler has managed to carve a niche and stay in the game nearly twice as long as Drake by not breaking but skewing every rule. The ultimate long-game player. His definitive, cold-eyed crack rap with Clipse made for icier verses and spikier beats than anyone was prepared for. Then he went solo and only tweaked and varied the formula as needed to stay fresh and continue to pop up every few years more respected and inventively hard than before. His best work thrives on Kanye and Pharrell’s strangest ideas. In his 40s, he scored his first-ever number-one album in 2022. By my lights, he’s done everything right. Nothing was more satisfying than his 2018 piledriver “The Story of Adidon” turning Drake to shish kebab, the best diss track in the genre since Jay-Z’s kingmaking “Takeover.” But Push is still a rapper’s rapper. More popular than ever, but too niche to make more than a dent. No one disagrees that he ate Aubrey’s lunch, and the man couldn’t even respond, not after Push announced Drake had a kid — to wit: “you are hiding a child” — before he did. But it did not cause Big Drake to cease operations.

That brings us to 2024. Kendrick Lamar is the perfect foil for this man. Whereas Drake bends over backwards throwing everything at the wall to stay on top, fearful of losing the world’s attention and perpetually dogged by the spectre of disrespect around the corner, Kendrick is short, zen, and unbothered. His rap technique defines virtuosity, simultaneously clean-cut like a katana and zigzagging like bebop. Rhythmically and lexically unpredictable, uttered in as many voices as he can think up, sometimes different ones in the same song. It’s no surprise that Kendrick’s sound played a role in pulling jazz out of an all-time sales nadir or even that he’s the first musician of the pop era to win the Pulitzer Prize for music with 2017’s hard-punching DAMN. His biggest chart-topping solo hit pleads “sit down, be humble,” especially sage advice for anyone who gets in his way.

 

 

There is no jazz in Drake. He is the embodiment of crass. Kendrick’s lyrics can be messy, dated, arrogant and oft-dotted with the term “bitch.” But in crucial ways, he is the embodiment of class. You couldn’t find more fitting rivals. Drake represents everything believed to be calculated, conniving and soulless. Kendrick is often considered the beating heart of rap, its moral conscience. Hell, he named his last album Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers. So as mere larger-than-life figures at odds, this looks like the battle for hip-hop’s soul.

It’s not. It’s a dorm-room roshambo. It’s a schoolyard fight with hair-pulling and pocket knives. It’s two bros receding gloriously into heck. It’s hate for the sake of pure hate, that anybody can enjoy. As the litany of outstanding memes have pointed out, the Kendrick/Drake beef is an inspiration, that we could all be hating so much harder. The closest thing I have to an analogy for this pinnacle of ill will is when Roger Ebert relayed in print that in his esteemed capacity as a Pulitzer winner himself, he wanted to make clear that Rob Schneider’s movies sucked.

Setting aside questions like “what took so long,” Kendrick Lamar, Future and Metro Boomin joined forces on “Like That” to declare war on Drake and J. Cole, months after the two mumbled basic provocations on 2023’s “First Person Shooter.” I’ll be the first to tell you I did not care. The song went to number one, but much has already been made of how this all scanned as a last-ditch attempt to make rap exciting again after recent efforts by megastars like Travis Scott fell flat and alleged torchbearers like Babyface Ray and Veeze haven’t exactly crossed over. My eyebrows went up when Cole, a rapper notable for reaching megastardom while rapping about like, folding clothes with his partner, or the awkwardness of losing his virginity, stepped into his big-boy shoes and responded on a song called “7 Minute Drill” that struggled fascinatingly to muster up insults for Kendrick, an artist he adores and has produced. Cole wasted no time admitting his heart wasn’t in it, that he isn’t built for battle rapping, and poetically deleted the song off his Might Delete Later mixtape within days. He was widely mocked for this at the time. More and more, with the events that have unfolded since, rap fans have almost unanimously come to respect his decision. 

 

AUDIO: Future, Metro Boomin and Kendrick Lamar “Like That”

That’s because there is nothing half-hearted about the barbs Drake and Kendrick have exchanged since. Well. That depends if you believe Drake has half a heart to begin with, because his signature back-to-back initial responses poked at Kendrick’s height (“Taylor Made Freestyle”) and how his TDE % split are ripping him off (“Push Ups”). “Taylor Made Freestyle” used another gimmick, AI soundalikes of Snoop and 2Pac rapping Drake’s verses that eventually attracted legal censure from the 2Pac estate. Taylor Swift released a typically world-swallowing monolith in between, chalked up new world records, and for a moment it looked like Kendrick was not going to respond.

I have never been more wrong.

 

AUDIO: Kendrick Lamar “euphoria”

The six-minute “euphoria” was a Kendrick bombshell in miniature, a flaming crater on Drake’s front lawn with all his usual dizzying beat switches and speaking in tongues, all trained on his enemy in the crosshairs. It opened a dozen Pandora’s boxes and insinuations (“don’t tell no lie about me and I won’t tell no truths about you”), blew this whole thing wide open, and turned the lamest hip-hop beef in years into the battle royale of the last decade if not more. Kendrick hates everything about him, believes Drake don’t like women, and most uncomfortably, mocks the Torontoan dialect, and repeatedly tells the biracial superstar that he has no right to use the n-word. That got the internet’s attention.

Then Kendrick goes back-to-back himself, dropping “6:16 in L.A.,” a parody of Drake’s similarly timestamped loosies co-produced by Jack Antonoff, who mysteriously always knows how to keep himself in the news cycle. The bulk of the pretty, Al Green-sampling track is spent taunting Drake about moles in his camp, which is very funny combined with the news that Drake tried to stop this battle with a cease-and-desist and Pusha T’s 2018 assertion that he got his own intel from disloyal OVO leakers.

 

 

This is where things go Oppenheimer. Drake unleashes “Family Matters,” one of the meanest and most comprehensive, driven works he’s ever put to tape. I’ve been hating him for upwards of 2000 words now and it impressed me with its conviction, and even its rapping. If this is what Drake sounds like with his ass on fire, please keep lighting the match. The beat is standard but knife-edged. Drake strikes a blow for low culture by calling Kendrick’s activism fake and casts all kinds of aspersions on his admittedly longtime engagement with Whitney Alford, saving the ugliest one for the end, that he “beat on his queen” and made the story disappear with a “crisis management team.”

 

VIDEO: Drake “Family Matters”

What no one, least of all Drake, saw coming was Kendrick’s own jaw-droppingly distasteful “Meet the Grahams” swallowing the thunder of Drake’s response not 30 minutes later, by directly addressing individual members of Drake’s family in each verse a la “Stan” and increasingly escalating into declarations that Drake is a sexual predator surrounded by accomplices, whose father should be ashamed of making him. He also echoes Push in claiming Drake has yet another child unknown to the public, which is too hilarious even if it’s completely false. And in no uncertain words, Kendrick says Drake deserves to die. It is a turning point that invites serious discomfort, stunned silence, and all sorts of questions about whether or not this is fun anymore or good for the world.

 

AUDIO: Kendrick Lamar “Meet The Grahams”

Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre bravely takes on the burden of being the fun police and arguing maybe such unmitigated, unprecedented ugliness is not good for the culture, or these grown men, or rap fans. His take on all this is great work and you should read it. As I am not a black man, my POV is removed and impersonal and by default a privileged perspective. I have no community that will be affected by the aftershocks of this beef. It’s here that I should lay out: I hope no one gets hurt. I hope no one has been hurt. While Drake is an oily character who did reportedly date a teenager once, and his on-record persona is anathema to everything I admire in popular artists, I do not believe his iffy text-friendship with Millie Bobby Brown is enough of a smoking gun that he grooms and preys on the underage. I think those outrageous allegations are both funny and out of hand, and I hope that’s the end of the story.

It’s much more upsetting to hear that Kendrick, who often posits himself as a voice of the voiceless, may have assaulted women, but Drake and Media Takeout are not (yet) sufficient sources. It’s a bullseye for Drake to attempt to assail Kendricks’ reputation on that point, and this is all insane, but Pierre isn’t wrong that hip-hop has been plagued by powerful villains in real life, most recently Diddy. Until there’s proof though, I’m not going to negate the enjoyment I had this weekend being shocked and stunned in real time the way millions of other people enjoy trash TV or reality shows, or the high school battles I lived to participate in and watch at crowded cafeteria tables. Music has always been my sports, which is distasteful in itself to plenty of people, and hyperbole is the cornerstone of Wrestlemania. Everyone has their own personal line for the boundaries of taste, but this online extinction-level event struck a chord for a reason, and whether or not there’s more to Kendrick’s instant-classic mic drop that it was “A minor,” this is some of pop’s grandest theater ever.

That one’s from “Not Like Us,” the catchiest and most jovial of all Kendrick’s drone strikes, simultaneously the track from this entire beef that’s having the most fun and the one that keeps doubling down on the most unsettling allegations, even using straightforwardly using the word “pedophile.” As of this writing, it has prompted only one response from Drake, “The Heart Part 6,” where he also feels the need to straightforwardly make clear he hasn’t done anything with anyone underage, followed by the absurd logic that he would have already been arrested if so. It’s a feeble response; how can it not be? If you spent your weekend having your reputation destroyed four times, maybe the best you’d be able to come up with is also that you tricked your opponent with false leads. It’s tiring, and it admittedly gets to the tiring nature of all this, the depressing comedown yes, where can we even go from here.

 

AUDIO: Kendrick Lamar “Not Like Us”

I’ll personally feel better when I know the two biggest rap stars on Earth live to tell what I hope are tall tales. Because contrary to what a lot of hardcore fans believe, rap is so much more rewarding when it escapes from reality. For many, many people struggling to pay their healthcare or rent, after years of Trump and COVID and the striking down of Roe v. Wade and other bullshit, this beef was hysterical catharsis that hopefully won’t affect us anymore than an all-time pyrotechnic display of bullshitting.

As with wrestling, Kendrick makes a good face and Drake a delicious heel, and we got to see the well-read, class-conscious underdog whup the grotesquely rich, cavalier “master manipulator” of women. It’s a good thing to second-guess cheering it on, and to examine your feelings. But the beef of the century is also a free pass for excusable hate, to exorcise your own demons and frustrations and most of all, to laugh with impunity at a powerful, childish bully. Just don’t let it turn you into a bully yourself. Or as BBL Drizzy once said, laugh now, cry later.