Drake's Having A Public Meltdown And I'm So Here For It
Drake is so high school with money
Drake’s new “Fighting Irish Freestyle” is about how he’s hurt. Hurt by men he thought were friends until he saw them riding with Kendrick. What? He made an ‘I’m Sad’ record about Lebron James breaking his heart? Are you kidding me? Is this an AI parody of Drake? I mean, ok the opening line is fire. “The summer is over, I missed it. Barrel with smoke and I kissed it.” A poetic way of saying I got killed in the battle. But then he goes on to whine about how he’s upset about… how he and Lebron used to trade expensive watches and talk about Drake’s son. Drake says Lebron convinced him that their friendship was rooted in love but now Drake says it isn’t. Now it’s just cold shoulders in the Hamptons. It’s 2025 and a rapper is really rapping about “cold shoulders I gave in the Hamptons.” Like we’re really rapping about stuff that happened at Michael Rubin’s white party? When people say hiphop is dead they point to stuff like that. Drake is like high school with money so it’s on brand that he’s currently upset about his friend, who happens to be a billionaire, not liking him enough. Drake is a bro. Like, he lives for the boys and one of the coolest boys in school likes his opp. So we get another chapter of Why Drizzy Is Sad. Sometimes it’s because of a woman. This time it’s because he thought Lebron was his brother, but Lebron loves Kendrick, so Drake is hurt. Thought we’d always be close like ovens and kitchens is a really dumb line. Are the ghosts on vacation? And the whole notion of a song about how he’s upset about other people’s reactions to the battle is wild. He says, “the Dennis James come out when the vodka is flooding my system” but where was that energy during the battle? And now he’s threatening Lebron? “God forbid we ever got to tarnish your public image?” Seriously? Because he’s a fan of Kendrick? That’s wild.
In the 3rd verse Drake sends shots at Universal Music Group—“Signal conversations, boy, I hope they got double encryption/ I hate to see the empire crumble on Judge's convictions.” Which makes it clear that he’s still pressing forward with this legal attack on UMG even though almost everyone in the industry thinks it’s an insane move. One music business insider told me, “Drake has become as destructive to his career as Kanye was to his when he was going through his episode.” I was asking this person to help me understand what was going on with Drake’s legal action against UMG but for him and so many in the business, there’s mostly shock that Drake would file it. “It's the corniest thing that I've ever heard of in my 30 years of doing music. It's so anti-hiphop. It's like, to me, your hiphop membership card should be revoked.”
Long story short, Drake is moving toward suing UMG, his parent label, because he’s alleging that they inflated Kendrick’s “Not Like Us,” via payola and bots, a move calculated to hurt Drake’s career. But what’s really going on? Music business insiders I talked to said this is probably about one of two things. One idea is that this is about trying to get off of the label.