It is my great pleasure to introduce Queue It Up with Kay, a music column brought to you by The Scribe’s resident hot take artist, yours truly. I will be bringing you everything from album reviews to guilty pleasures to rap beef synopses.
I would like to start by taking a moment to reflect on one of the most earth-rocking music moments I have ever experienced: the Kendrick Lamar-Drake beef of 2024.
The entirety of Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s beef was characterized by Lamar dropping song-of-the-year bangers and Drake making it worse for himself with disappointing (I suspect ghost-written) comeback attempts.
I still remember the adrenaline coursing through my veins as I witnessed Kendrick drop back-to-back daggers following Drake’s trifling attempt at victory via “Family Matters.” I knew that Lamar’s impeccable tracks would be the end of Drake’s reign.
“Push Ups” had me in the first half. There were some hard-hitting bars and an intense instrumental, like the rapper Drake we saw on “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late” in 2015.
After that, it seemed like Drake was grasping at half-baked Kendrick rumors, while Kendrick dished out bombshell accusations with twice the lyrical expertise and delivery.
Lamar accused Drake of housing sex-offenders in his OVO team, using Ozempic and being a pedophile, as many know from Lamar’s iconic “Tryna strike a chord, and it’s probably A-minor” bar in “Not Like Us.”
Drake accused Lamar of living away from his wife Whitney Alford and two kids and physically abusing Alford, asserting that Alford cheated on Lamar with filmmaker and producer Dave Free. Lamar quickly put these allegations to rest with the “Not Like Us” music video, featuring Alford, Lamar and their two kids dancing in their Compton, California home. Dave Free produced the video.
On top of lyrically obliterating Drake, Lamar broke several of Drake’s streaming records with “Not Like Us.” In a last-ditch effort to stay alive in this rap battle, Drake dropped “The Heart Part 6,” a stab at Lamar’s series of songs titled “The Heart” that have preceded the release of all his major albums. In this song, Drake claimed he planted all the rumors Lamar rapped about — quite an easy out from such serious allegations, no?
Drake fell silent after “Not Like Us” captivated the internet. He stayed off Instagram for a month, deleted all evidence of the squabble with K-Dot and stayed away from music.
On June 4, Drake made a comeback with “Wah Gwan Delilah,” a parody of the Plain White T’s classic “Hey There Delilah” that he collaborated on with Toronto comedian Snowd4y. The song is so atrocious that some people speculated it was AI.
I see the collab as a faulty attempt to regain attention after being demolished by Kendrick. Either Drake had truly given up or thought the best way to maintain relevance was to volunteer himself as meme material. Neither of these options gave me any hope for Drake to regain his footing in the rap world.
Now, four months post-beef, Drake seems to be struggling to avoid mediocrity.
Drake created a leak-esque website entitled 100 Gigs For Your Headtop in early August, where he has since released over a decade’s worth of pictures, videos and inspiration for past releases. The site also features some new Drake songs, also accessible on streaming platforms.
Most notably, the 100 Gigs dump featured “It’s Up” with 21 Savage and Young Thug and “Housekeeping Knows” featuring Latto. Aside from the features, the songs sound like more of the same Drake flow we’ve grown accustomed to since “Her Loss.”
I love a Young Thug appearance (especially in today’s YSL trial times) and can never pass on a 21 Savage feature, but Drake sounds like he’s serving the same song with different garnishes on all five new tracks.
The 100 Gigs format also seems to be a sign that Drake has given up any hope of building anticipation for his new music. It seems he needed the surprise dump format to arouse any kind of excitement from his followers.
While I recognize that Drake will always hold a place in history as one of the greats (I still find it impossible to skip any song from “Take Care”), I think it’s safe to say Drake can’t produce guaranteed hits anymore. Yes, Drake will always be the artist who has the same amount of #1 hits as King of Pop Michael Jackson, but I doubt he will ever give us a solo track that can break Jackson’s record.
Drake will probably never be done, but his attitude following the Kendrick Lamar beef shows a tired, hurt and unexcited Aubrey. Say goodbye to the glory days of young, hungry, ready to take over the world 2010s Drake — he is lost in the last decade.
Graphic by Livi Davis.