By now, the events of May 2024 have hardened into rap mythology. As the story goes, someone close to Drake leaked “Family Matters” to Kendrick Lamar ahead of its release, allowing Kendrick to engineer the devastating one-two punch of “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us” with near-cinematic precision. On the latter song, Kendrick is no longer battling Drake so much as narrating his death. “I see dead people,” he taunts on the song’s opening line, transforming Drake from rap rival into corpse before the public had even processed what was happening.
Kendrick’s war with Drake — the rap battle that refuses to end — was preoccupied with annihilation, the total elimination of Drake as a cultural figure. And for a time, it appeared to work. Allegations of pedophilia and grooming became permanently attached to his public image, chanted in arenas and clubs with ecclesiastical fervor. Worse still, Drake’s lawsuit against UMG over the allegedly defamatory claims in “Not Like Us” appeared to violate the unspoken rules of rap warfare itself, lending further legitimacy to the idea that, despite a nearly two-decade run atop rap’s commercial hierarchy, Drake would always remain an outsider to “the culture.”
And yet, two years later, Aubrey Graham has returned, freshly looksmaxxed and eager to settle old scores. There he is, stalking through snow-covered crime scenes and frozen wastelands in the slick, high-production visuals for the song “Whisper My Name,” from his long-promised new album, Iceman. There he is again, raising a shot glass directly to camera while appearing to taunt A$AP Rocky: “Where she at?/Where she go,” he smirks on “Burning Bridges.” He furnishes a gas canister to burn down an apparent bot farm in the music video for “Make Them Know,” the production of which caused a small furor in Toronto.
The three-album onslaught Drake released on Friday does more than attempt a comeback. It takes on the Herculean task of reframing the argument entirely. Beginning with the bruised and war-ready Iceman, and culminating in the diasporic maximalism of Habibti and Maid of Honour, Drake delivers the kind of fluid, cross-genre musical exchange he mastered years ago with projects like 2017’s More Life. When he’s at his best, this quality makes the rigid authenticity politics animating many of his critics sound like conservative nostalgia for a world of fixed borders. The deeper irony is that Drake, for all of his own questionable politics, may be right in the end.
In the mainstream, “Not Like Us” flattened into an easily legible shorthand for what the internet understood to be the Black consensus. The song reduced a sprawling and internally dynamic culture into something cleanly partitioned and morally coherent — an “us” versus a “them” — the kind of framework white cultural institutions instinctively know how to reward.
Drake doesn’t have to point this out explicitly to expose the contradiction. Take “Ran to Atlanta,” featuring Future alongside the red-hot Southern California rapper Molly Santana, freshly independent after being signed to Victor Victor. While Kendrick’s critique was never strictly about collaboration, “Not Like Us” ultimately reduced Drake’s relationship to Atlanta into a simplistic morality play, one where the city functions as a symbol for an authentic Blackness Drake can only imitate from the outside. The problem is that Kendrick’s historical framing barely withstands scrutiny. His vaguely folkloric language, conjuring “settlers” and “town folk,” collapses a range of real anxieties into a simplistic, symbolic drama with Drake cast as the outsider villain. While far from the most compelling work Drake has made with Atlanta rappers, “Ran to Atlanta” chips away at the faulty logic of his detractors. What distinguishes Drake’s participation in Atlanta’s musical ecosystem from the countless other artists, executives, media figures, and corporations who have profited from the city’s cultural output for decades? And what does it mean that virtually no major Atlanta rapper publicly embraced Kendrick’s framing?
On “Make Them Remember,” Drake offers another pointed rejoinder. Is there not a certain strangeness to the glee with which “Not Like Us” wielded the accusation of pedophilia? Drake muddies the moral certainty, rapping, “Pedo bars going Number One, and y’all trying to tell me who’s grooming who?” It’s a far more effective rebuttal than his earlier insistence on “The Heart Pt. 6” that he was simply too famous to commit the acts he was accused of. Whatever one believes about Drake, the speed with which the accusation transformed into communal entertainment was difficult to ignore. The strange thing wasn’t that people believed it, but how quickly the allegation became a spectacle. At a moment when the public’s attention span for allegations had itself become fleeting, millions of people happily turned the language of child abuse into mass entertainment. That is, in fact, really fucking weird, especially with some distance from the moment.
This cuts to the core of what Drake seems most upset about on Iceman. While his acrimony lingers in the air longer than it perhaps needs to, it’s the first moment in a decade where the preening self-seriousness actually feels a bit justified. There’s character assassination, and then there’s having the world call you a pedophile at the Super Bowl. Whatever “rules” of hip-hop sanctioned the diss — funny how no one fixated on rap’s sacred creeds seems terribly concerned about the pillars of break dancing or graffiti — appear only to apply when it comes to Drake, a double standard he’s been griping about all his career, to varying degrees of effectiveness.
Iceman spends much of its hour-long runtime dismantling the claims made against Drake, and at times, the bickering feels tedious. Even if you are a sane human who doesn’t find pedophile jokes funny, the album still feels overstuffed with rebuttals that at times feel like too little, too late. Also, he’s got to lay off A$AP at this point, sheesh.
Even so, Drake offers up the requisite earworm. “Janice STFU” finds a new sonic texture in his delivery, while “Shabang” lands squarely in the joyous realm of the kind of hits he used to deliver with ease. “2 Hard 4 The Radio” flips the West Coast sound deployed against him on “Not Like Us” into a veritable banger, and has already managed to spur an online discourse exposing the cynicism at the heart of regional gatekeeping. Though it’s far from Drake’s most compelling work, Iceman accomplishes the task of clearing the field after he’d been declared, among other things, dead. Which, to his credit, was a rather tall order.
Having gotten that out of the way, Drake appears free to lean into experimentation on Habibti and Maid of Honour, the latter being his strongest work since More Life. On Habibti, we open with “Rusty Intro,” where Drake croons over an acoustic guitar while Florida’s DJ Frisco954 infuses the state’s fast-paced sensibility into the track, making for a genuinely surprising and engaging piece of niche regional crossover — a kind of curation Drake excels at. Habtiti, on the whole, feels like the Drake album we would have gotten a couple of years ago were there no 2024 rap beef. At a tight 11 songs, this album finds Drake in romantic territory, having shed the guarded iciness of Iceman and embracing the R&B loverboy that audiences first came to love him for. On “WNBA,” he’s in the same melodic bag as he was on Views, pirouetting between trap drums and oozing synths while expressing an emotion other than paranoia for once.
On “Slap the City,” we’re taken back to his debut, as the beat flips the Kanye-co-produced Thank Me Later highlight “Show Me a Good Time” to riveting effect. “I’m Spent,” featuring a pitch-perfect Loe Shimmy, finds Drake in a genuinely vulnerable headspace, questioning his own longevity. “Prioritizing” is as contemplative as we’ve seen Drake in a long time, rapping about anxieties about technology and AI in some of his most human and relatable work yet.
The trifecta’s crown jewel, however, is Maid of Honour, which seemingly picks up where 2022’s Honestly, Nevermind left off, but with far more confidence in its execution. We open with the electric “Hoe Phase,” a dazzling display of how dance music, unlike traditional hip-hop, thrives on fluidity, breezing between sonic textures with the seamlessness of a DJ’s transitions. Elsewhere, “Outside Tweakin” finds Drake floating over a footwork beat alongside Stunna Sandy. Surely, the Midwestern dance music lineage that produced innovators like the late DJ Rashad deserves its moment in the limelight, and there frankly isn’t another rapper operating at Drake’s scale engaging this deeply with niche Black regional sounds. The song treats the broader landscape of Black music as a living, interconnected continuum. “Cheetah Print” gives us Sexyy Red offering up a new rendition of the “Cha Cha Slide,” sure to animate barbecues across the country all summer. “Amazing Shape,” with Popcaan, is an upgrade on the pair’s already excellent collaboration from Views, the kind of dancehall banger that feels like it could last generations.
Maid of Honour‘s closer, “Princess,” takes Drake’s most divisive left turn yet, a cross between shoegaze and emo that lands cleaner than any rap-rock crossover this decade. Which is precisely what makes the album such a compelling rejoinder to the world that “Not Like Us” imagined. This album draws from Black musical traditions that are often maligned in the mainstream for existing outside the rigid, often hyper-conservative, hyper-masculine boundaries of commercial Black music. Queer nightlife, dancehall, and house music, all undeniably Black cultural innovations, braid seamlessly across the album’s nimble 45-minute runtime.
Drake has spent much of his career being criticized for being too willing to absorb the sounds and styles around him. Maid of Honour reframes those same qualities as a form of cultural fluency. The album’s underlying argument is not that identity no longer matters, but that culture itself has become too unstable, interconnected, and diasporic to survive the authenticity politics that “Not Like Us” briefly restored to the center of rap discourse. (And how well has that dogmatism served the genre these past two years, with no apparent heir to restore whatever was supposedly lost in Drake’s reign?)
This does not make Drake innocent of opportunism. If anything, Maid of Honour occasionally risks treating entire musical traditions as atmosphere to drift through. But that tension is also what makes the album feel strangely honest about the conditions of contemporary culture. Drake makes hits in real time, as he taunts on “2 Hot 4 The Radio,” and it’s a sentiment worth considering. In the end, Drake’s three-album return does more than prove he can move past “Not Like Us.” It shows that he survived it by becoming even more himself. The very qualities that Kendrick framed as evidence of inauthenticity have been recast as a prudent understanding of the times. Whether that vision feels liberating or cynical may ultimately depend on how much one still believes culture can remain fixed in the first place.
POND Creative*
