Drake is America's sweetheart.
He didn't have us at hello. It's been a slow
press — one that involved 3/4-tempo
crooners one after the other, getting denied
at the gates of the Miami Heat locker room,
dressing like your grandpa , and rooting for
a basketball team that plays in Toronto
whose mascot is a dinosaur. Quietly and
softly, like a whisper caught between two
cotton balls, Drake has crafted an image for
himself as the kind of guy who interlocks
his fingers with yours when you give him
high-fives, kisses you on the forehead, and
burps in a napkin. It's impossible to hate
Drake.
Yet someone has attempted to do him
harm.
Over the past 10 days or so, Meek Mill, a
Philadelphia rapper and Nicki Minaj's
maybe ( depending on whom you ask )
fiancé, has asserted that America's
sweetheart isn't writing his own raps.
Meek's assertion put everything we think
we know about Drake into question.
The Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj Twitter feud,
explained
Has Drake been faking this whole time?
What if he's not as soft as we think? What
if the whole team wasn't there like he
rapped it? What if he wears none of his
chains while he's in the house? What if he
doesn’t open potato chip bags with
scissors?
This has been a truly upsetting week for
Drizzy fans — the gentle man that they love
might be a fraud. Ultimately, Drake's
rapping and lyrics are the reason a man
this kind can endure and thrive in an
industry that is notoriously difficult — and
now that's been thrown into question.
Since then, Meek and Drake have been
engaged in a fight that spans Twitter,
Instagram, and diss tracks, ensuring sure
that everyone is and will be watching for a
next move. There have been insults about
prenups, Drake's writing ability, and Nicki
Minaj.
What this fight comes down to is a
pressing and ever-changing question of
authenticity in hip-hop and, perhaps, a
brilliant marketing strategy.
Who is this human who hates Drake?
Why does he hate him?
Meek Mill. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)
For most of humanity, the most animosity
one could feel toward Drake — a.k.a.
Aubrey Drake Graham — is one of
neutrality. Meek Mill was, at one point, on
the same page as the rest of us. The two
had collaborated on Meek's song
"R.I.C.O.," and until last week, we didn't
really have any reason to suspect that there
might be bad blood between the two.
Meek dropped his album Dreams Worth
More Than Money on June 29 , and Drake
apparently didn't tweet out support for the
release. So, weeks later, Meek began his
assault on Drake in the middle of the night
on Twitter; fans were criticizing his music,
and he was being compared to Drake:
Stop comparing drake to me too.... He don't write
his own raps! That's why he ain't tweet my album
because we found out!
4:46 AM - 22 Jul 2015
135,622 108,461
Meek Mill
@MeekMill
The verse he's tweeting about is part of the
song "R.I.C.O.," the song that we thought
represented goodwill between the two:
He ain't even write that verse on my album and if I
woulda knew I woulda took it off my album..... I
don't trick my fans! Lol
4:57 AM - 22 Jul 2015
53,892 43,837
Meek Mill
@MeekMill
The man alleged to be Drake's ghostwriter
is a man named Quentin Miller. Miller has
defended Drake's honor, saying that Drake
wrote his own songs.
Is Drake sad?
Drake could have easily ignored all of this.
He's more famous and bigger than Meek.
Surely Drake has heard — as have we all —
the warning that you will inevitably look like
a fool if you fight on the internet. And
Drake looked like he was sticking to that
conventional wisdom, keeping quiet on
Instagram and Twitter. However, a rapper
named Hitman Holla published an alleged
private DM (direct message) exchange he
had with Drake addressing and brushing off
Meek's accusations:
Drake's official public response came in a
song called "Charged Up," released on July
25:
In the song, Drake raps about being so
popular that people are now gunning for
him, and about how his lyrics are so good
that Meek thinks he couldn't possibly
create them:
Wow, I’m honored that you think this
is staged
I’m flattered man, in fact, I’m
amazed
The perfect start to the summer,
man this shit is a doozy
This shit a twist in the movie but
don't jump to conclusions
(Before continuing, let's take a moment to
be wary of Drake's concept of time. It's
almost August, and he's rapping about the
beginning of summer? Sure.)
Meek was not impressed by the track,
stating that he believed the song's subpar
raps were indicative of Drake's skills as a
lyricist:
Baby lotion soft......
1:33 AM - 26 Jul 2015
43,456 36,113
Meek Mill
@MeekMill
I can tell he wrote that 1 tho......
1:58 AM - 26 Jul 2015
126,414 111,722
Meek Mill
@MeekMill
Then, on Wednesday, July 29, Drake
released another diss track entitled "Back
to Back Freestyle":
Personally, I like "Back to Back" better
because it's more forthright, but there's
also strange comedy in its bones. Drake
raps about Meek's relationship with Nicki
Minaj and how Minaj is more successful
than the man she's with:
You love her then you gotta give the
world to her
Is that a world tour or your girl's
tour?
I know that you gotta be a thug for
her
This ain’t what she meant when she
told you to open up more
He's referring to Minaj's Pinkprint Tour,
where Meek is the opening act. To be clear,
anyone not named Beyoncé or Rihanna or,
yes, Drake, would be lucky to open for
Minaj. Minaj is just that big of a star.
But Drake makes it sound like a charity gig,
like Minaj is giving Meek a ride to the mall.
This track also plays on the knowledge that
Drake and Minaj were part of an industry
showmance,where rumors about them
dating are always around the corner.
But there are also some silly parts to the
song too. Drake raps about Meek's punk
Twitter moves, again hinting that Minaj is
the one bringing home the bacon in that
relationship:
Yeah, trigger fingers turn to Twitter
fingers
Yeah, you gettin' bodied by a singin'
ni**a
I'm not the type of ni**a that'll type
to ni**as
And shout-out to all my boss bitches
wife-in ni**as
Make sure you hit him with the
prenup
Yes, that is actually a threatening rap about
Twitter and tweeting. We've come a long
way from the Tupac and Biggie era of diss
tracks, when artists rapped about
murdering people and people were literally
getting murdered:
The Meek and Drake fight is different in that
it isn't an obscure, intra-genre fight. It's
public, mainstream. And you fight
differently when a large chunk of your
audience consists of white bros in Sperrys.
Lyrics about Twitter, and fights like this, are
now part of that mainstream reality.
Does it matter if Drake didn't write his
stuff?
It depends on whom you ask. Some people
care a lot, some people only care if he
didn't write certain songs, and others may
not care at all. People who live, breathe,
and obsessively consume hip-hop are
ultimately very different from people who
simply enjoy the music that Drake and
Meek put out. This was actually discussed
by Slaughterhouse, a hip-hop Justice
League of sorts, who visited Hot 97 and
were asked what they thought about
Meek's accusations:
"It don’t stop the music from being great. It
don’t stop you from being successful. I
don’t lose respect for you personally, but
just in my comic book hero, rapper baseball
card collection, I can’t put you [in that
league/conversation/category]," Crooked I
said. "Being from that cloth where you get
your stripes from writing, you do kinda step
down a few, in my mind as a fan, if you’re
not writing."
The idea of authenticity in hip-hop and its
importance doesn't start with Drake and
Meek. Hip-hop, like blues and soul music,
has a history of personal narrative that
transcends construction — these lyrics and
these songs come from the guts of artists,
reflecting what they've been through.
Mary J. Blige got at this idea of realism and
artistry when describing Beyoncé. She told
Women's Wear Daily in 2013:
It’s not like Beyoncé can’t sing … But
what’s missing is the personal.
Those girls are groomed to be pop
artists, to be perfect, to go to
modeling school and learn how to
walk and talk. Whereas we had to go
through the trenches and get beat
up and knocked down by life to learn
how to articulate ourselves properly.
And there’s no school for that.
There’s no school for organic.
Pop music, as Blige explains, is a different
game, where no one cares about
authenticity. But we're at a point now where
the line between hip-hop artists and pop
artists has blurred. You have a rapper from
Australia with a voice that sounds like it
was dug out of Georgia mud, a
former corrections officer who brags about
being a drug trafficker, two theater kids
who went to LaGuardia and became Azealia
Banks and Nicki Minaj , and, of course,
Macklemore .
Questlove wrote an essay for Vulture in
2014 explaining the idea of authenticity
waning in hip-hop and that the genre has
become hollow:
The music originally evolved to paint
portraits of real people and handle
real problems at close range —
social contract, anyone? — but these
days, hip-hop mainly rearranges
symbolic freight on the black
starliner. Containers on the
container ship are taken from here to
there — and never mind the fact that
they may be empty containers ...
And then there’s the question of
where hip-hop has arrived
commercially, or how fast it’s
departing. The music industry in
general is sliding, and hip-hop is
sliding maybe faster than that.
How you view Meek and Drake's fight over
authenticity, and how much Drake's alleged
ghostwriting bothers you, likely depends on
how you view Drake as an artist. If you
think he skews more toward Iggy Azalea
and other pop artists, then the accusation
doesn't concern you. You likely thought his
music was fake right from the start. But if
you're looking to Drake as someone closer
to an artist like Kendrick Lamar, whose
authenticity and ability to tell stories in his
music defines his art, then it's all been one
great fraud.
Is this the most brilliant marketing
scheme ever created?
Yes!
The grand truther theory to all of this
drama is that this is just a huge publicity
stunt. Meek wasn't a household name
before his allegations, and I'm not quite
sure if he's there yet. But it has raised his
profile, upgrading his cred from the man
who might be engaged to Nicki Minaj to the
rapper who is fighting with Drake.
The fight coincided with Meek debuting the
video to his song "All Eyes On You,"
released on Tuesday.
It has more than 3 million hits on YouTube
now, and it's been online for two days.
Fans are were also anxiously awaiting
Meek's own diss track , and vigilantly
camping out on his various social media
platforms. On Thursday, he released the
track, titled "Wanna Know":
The reaction from Thursday night wasn't
positive for Meek. But nevertheless, people
are still talking about him, and more people
know his name than when this fight first
started.
And this isn't a one-way street. Drake is
benefiting too.
The benefit, as Complex's Frazier Tharpe
explains , is that this beef, even if it is
happening on Twitter and would make
Biggie groan from beyond the grave, gives
Drake legitimacy. Tharpe wrote:
The Boy is basically embraced,
accepted, and championed from all
ends. Sure, there was a Common
diss, a Puffy scuffle, and the rap
purists who will never be down, but
overall the fan-to-hater ratio is
exceedingly lopsided. Now his
defensive raps have been
legitimized.
Drake’s now in the position of having
to defend and uphold his role as
both the nicest out and prove that,
as the NWTS bonus track says, it’s
all him … Warning shots at all of his
detractors in one versatile bundle.
The fight gives Drake a chance to establish
himself again, this time with more edge and
less emo. People will be paying even more
attention to his lyrics and his delivery, eager
to see what he has in store. And there's an
implication in "Charged Up" that more
tracks will be released.
So who's the winner in all of this?
Everyone, with Drake doing a bit better than
Meek. Even Nicki Minaj is getting a nice
boost ( she should totally dump Meek ).
But are any of these songs as good as
the "Trap Queen" remix?
No.
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