A lot has changed since Hassan Laija was just a high schooler in central Texas. Now better known as Peso Pluma, the 24-year-old superstar of música Mexicana (and recent Rolling Stone cover star) is a certified international phenomenon, one with the power to get people to line up as early as 4 a.m. and wait in lines that wrap several city blocks just for the chance of seeing him last night at Rolling Stone’s second annual Future of Music SXSW showcase.
Peso might’ve been the main draw, but the night’s lineup proved that there was something for everyone. With DJ Gabby Got It hyping up the crowd in between sets, spinning Selena tracks along with classic cumbia and reggaeton bops, the room was alive with the promise of Latin music.
Being the first opener of the night can be a challenge, but rising Puerto Rican talent Pink Pablo proved he was up to the task. Bounding onto the stage, he quickly won over the crowd with his infectious enthusiasm, giving them a taste of the alt-urbano sound he’s become known for with songs that pulled from a wide range of influences, including indie rock and reggaeton. Taking off his shirt early on in the set (one of his signature moves), he got the audience to put up their phones for “Veo Luces,” and debuted a new song, “Horses in Heaven,” a mellower, thoughtful track that had the audience swaying back and forth.
Next, J Noa came out swinging with “No Me Pueden Parar,” barely giving the room a chance to process what was happening before she let loose a string of rapid-fire rhymes. It was a fitting start for the Dominican rapper, who simply can’t be contained. It was her first time in Austin, and there’s no doubt she made an impression. If anyone in the audience didn’t know her name at the outset, by the time she got to “Spicy,” they were chanting it on repeat, going wild each time she finished a breakneck verse like they were watching a high-performance athlete score a goal. Part of what makes J Noa so captivating is her fearlessness. At just 17, she’s delivering fiery, take-no-prisoners tracks like “Qué Fue?,” aimed at government corruption in the Dominican Republic. “There are people who are scared to say it,” she told the crowd. “I’m not scared. I’ll say it. Period.”
The vibe took a turn when Mexican crooner Kevin Kaarl stepped onstage with his guitar in hand. While Noa had hyped up the audience, Kaarl hypnotized them, holding them in rapt attention. With his jangly guitar, and the occasional support from his backing banjo and trumpet players, the singer offered a nice change of pace, and the audience was clearly along for the ride, taking in the dreamy blend of folk, rock, and Norteño on songs like “me va a costar” and “Abrazado a Ti.” They ate up every final flourish of his guitar, swooned during the serenades, and whooped for each chorus, no matter how heartbreaking the lyrics might have been.
Even before Young Miko set foot on the stage, the crowd was already chanting her name. And by the first few songs, the audience had turned into the Puerto Rican urbano star’s own personal backing choir, singing along to every word of her songs. “I love your energy!” Miko told the crowd, beaming from the stage. Within a few minutes, Miko had turned the Moody Theater into an all-out dance party, popping off with heavy-hitting songs like “Lisa” and “wiggy,” one of the singles off of her upcoming debut album. Years ago, Miko made a name for herself through her savvy collaborations, proving she could stand toe-to-toe with some of the industry’s rising talents and established superstars. Now, it’s clear that she’s the main attraction.
Miko left the stage with the crowd begging for one more song, but it didn’t take long for them to remember what was coming next. The room was humming with anticipation, and Peso set the tone for his set before he even walked on, queuing up Supergrupo Son Tepito’s “Cumbia de Marisol” to play before his entrance, moving the audience on the upper levels to get on their feet and dance. Then, everything went dark.
The screen began to play a hype reel set to Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead,” as Peso’s band assembled onstage. Finally, Peso appeared, wearing a black ski mask. This is the power of El Doble P; even masked, he has completely taken over a room, with every single person waiting to hear his signature raspy voice. At full tilt, he ran around the stage, feeding off the energy in the crowd as he danced, making the comparisons from his manager that he’s a “Mexican Mick Jagger” come into focus. With his band behind him, it was almost cinematic, like he was the main character in an action film with a live orchestra behind him.
“The Doble P is back, motherfuckers!” he told the crowd. Ripping off his mask, he promised the crowd one of the most memorable nights of their lives, and he delivered, tearing through hit after hit. Throughout the high-octane set, he rarely stood still, constantly bouncing across the stage, headbanging, and even getting into the pit and moving through the crowd as they went wild trying to get close to him.
How do you end a set that’s been constantly ramping up? You put on a laser show with the colors of the Mexican flag, and head straight into “Lady Gaga.” “As long as I’m alive, we’re going to keep breaking records,” Peso said, winding up the crowd as he spoke about not caring what the press has to say about him. “Que vivan los corridos, que viva Mexico, y que siempre, por siempre de los siempres viva la puta Doble P!”
(Full disclosure: In 2021, Rolling Stone’s parent company, P-MRC, acquired a 50 percent stake in the SXSW festival.)
Drake onstage in Toronto last year
Everybody Likes Drake Again. That Means We’re Healing
Not to be dramatic or anything, but not too long ago, listening to people talk about Drake, you’d think he would never top the charts again. But here we are: With Iceman, he’s broken his own record, earning a 13th week atop Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart on Sept. 5, surpassing Take Care’s 12-week run more than a decade ago. The achievement comes after the great rap civil war of 2024, which was framed as everything from a referendum on Drake’s character as a human being to a cleansing of what popular radio host Ebro would describe, in February 2025, as “a sickness in the game.”
Again, not trying to be dramatic, but even if you were skeptical of the discourse circa 2024, it is a bit shocking to hear the public’s recent re-embrace of Drake. Consider how far the frenzy around the most salacious allegations on Kendrick Lamar‘s “Not Like Us” extended. There was Christopher Alvarez, a disabled journalist, being dragged into conspiracy theories. There was the woman from the resurfaced concert footage, now 31, having to publicly dispute the creepy significance strangers had assigned to an onstage kiss from when she was 17. Drake said in his lawsuit against UMG that the threats had forced him to pull his seven-year-old son out of school.
What now feels like the absurdity of the moment registered as something deathly serious at the time. By September 2024, Lamar was releasing the ominous “Watch the Party Die,” just days after his Super Bowl halftime performance was announced. Oh, also, a major talking point in American culture a year and a half ago was whether one of the biggest superstars in the world would be publicly branded a pedophile during the Super Bowl.
In what world would any celebrity recover from that?
Except, with time, the online frenzy surrounding the Drake and Lamar feud reads more like a mass-psychosis event than a cultural reckoning. The music, oddly enough, often seemed secondary to the certainty of everyone discussing it. “Not Like Us” was a veritable hit, absolutely. But its cultural dominance became bound up in a widespread vilification of Drake that curdled online, where the most damning interpretation of anything could quickly become the accepted one. For a while, even putting on a Drake song could feel like something you had to explain, as if listening amounted to taking a position on the allegations.
That this all happened in 2024 is meaningful. This was right in the peak of Elon Musk’s reconstruction of Twitter, privileging rage bait and engagement tactics that helped misinformation disseminate like fact. It was also the beginning of AI tools becoming sophisticated enough to produce convincing-sounding tracks. Even before Drake released his first response, “Push Ups,” AI-generated response tracks were circulating across social media. And so, in many ways, the well of public opinion was already poisoned.
Listeners’ recent embrace of Drake feels settled in a broader cultural shift brewing since 2024. The beef, in hindsight, feels like a dying vestige of whatever people want to call “Woke 1.0”: a particular faith that exposing the right person could amount to a cultural transformation. For a moment, defeating Drake seemed to promise something about the future of hip-hop, about who would belong in it and what it would tolerate.
There were obvious holes in the argument, namely who exactly these arbiters of culture were and why they were uniquely qualified to speak for the entirety of Black people, questions that Drake pokes at on “Ran to Atlanta” from Iceman. Still, these were never even supposed to be binding philosophical truths in the first place. To hear levelheaded commentators discuss it, this was all simply entertainment — two of the genre’s greats duking it out. Even one of the beef’s catalysts, Metro Boomin, echoed the sentiment, lamenting how online fans had turned the battle into something sinister. Hell, even Jay-Z said something similar before himself tossing a few jabs at Drizzy in a freestyle at the Roots Picnic this year. But the artists themselves supplied the allegations. The ability to raise those stakes and then retreat into “simply entertainment” was part of the dynamic, too.
Even so, how it all devolved into a pseudocultural reckoning says more about the environment fans exist in today than it does about either Drake or Lamar. In the years around the beef, shocking revelations about Diddy as well as the global elite’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have become folded into the background, alongside a sense that accountability remains selective. This atmosphere of collective powerlessness offers one explanation for the conspiratorial thinking at the heart of Lamar versus Drake. A frustration with an increasingly degraded world and dwindling resources to change it means outrage can mobilize an enormous number of people very quickly, with little holding them together once the moment passes.
The language of exploitation and cultural extraction gave the battle a purpose that seemed to extend well beyond either rapper. But even if you took the least charitable opinion imaginable of our Canadian hitmaker, what was supposed to happen after Drake was defeated? The industry whose supposed wickedness Drake allegedly embodied carried on selling the spectacle itself.
What everyone was caught up in was an appetite with a longer history than the social media platforms now feeding it. Lance Oppenheim’s new film, Primetime, returns to Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator, a television format that made public humiliation feel like a public service. The connection is in the experience offered to the audience. The viewer could enjoy the confrontation with the reassuring sense that watching served some larger good. Never mind if anything that was unfolding on screen amounted to justice.
In the historian Anton Jäger’s book-length essay Hyperpolitics, published earlier this year in English, he describes how the past decade’s surge of political feeling has coincided with a continuing withdrawal from communal life. More isolated digital environments can fuel extraordinary mobilization without the actual community organizations that might turn it into something tangible. Negating Drake, then, became a gesture in itself. A means of signaling a broader dissatisfaction with the direction of hip-hop culture. Where the problems extend to technology and the demoralizing margins of streaming music, for a while it felt good for people to just wrap it all up in one word: Drake.
But on Iceman, it’s hard to take the idea of Drake as an evil force within hip-hop very seriously, even as he himself makes an effort to lean into the role of the villain. Drake’s music is most potent when it’s aimed at the masses, even if he swears his nice-guy days are over. This is the Degrassi kid turned global superstar rivaling Taylor Swift, after all.
Now, with Fear of Missing Out, Drake’s cryptically announced project slated for release this week, we’ve entered a second kind of Drake Renaissance. However delusional it seems, there was a moment when it felt somehow wrong to play Drake. His return to the top of the charts suggests a good deal of people were eager to get back to listening.