Are we sure Drake is going to recover?

I’ve always considered Yasiin Bey to be a soothsayer.

Almost 25 years ago, I went to Circuit City and bought Bey’s (then known as Mos Def) debut solo album Black on Both Sides. I was 13 and hungry for rap music that felt like a full meal. The album would become foundational to my understanding of the world as a Black teenager in America. At the time, I’d tell people that the album was one of the best books I’d ever read, as it taught me about gentrification, colonization, and racial double standards. But the song I’d keep returning to as I got older was “New World Water,” a track that didn’t impress me sonically at first. The song is about the commodification of something as common as water, with prices rising and unsafe water being fed to Black communities. I thought about this song when the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, happened. I thought about it when my hometown, Jackson, Mississippi, struggled to maintain clean water. I think about it as our global climate falls apart by the day. Whenever I see these headlines, I think to myself: Mos Def tried to warn us.

Maybe we should have seen Drake’s 2024 coming when that same fortune teller started the year by asking one critical question about Drake: “What happens when this thing collapses?”

Bey later walked back his comments, referring to Drake as “very talented,” but his original statements have reverberated all through the year. At the time of Bey’s comments, the idea of Drake’s empire collapsing felt as impossible as him and Bey doing a song together. 

But nearly a year later and something that seemed like fiction is now more possible than ever. Drake’s career is at its most tenuous position, and he’s not doing himself any favors. The once-unimpeachable, ever-calculated hit machine finds himself the butt of viral lyrics, stadium-filled chants and accusations of cultural appropriation. It’s a bizarre place to see him in. But maybe it’s one we, like the Mighty Mos Def, could have seen coming.

Of course, the impetus for Drake’s no-good, very bad 2024 came from the musical onslaught at the hands of now-bitter rival Kendrick Lamar. The two traded songs all summer in a musical chess match that gave rap one of its most exhilarating feuds in history. When the songs aimed at each other first dropped — Drake’s “Taylor Made Freestyle” and “Pushups” and Lamar’s “Euphoria” and “6:16 in LA” — I was dismissive of the idea that the feud would have any marked detriment to either of their careers. “When the dust settles, both of their careers will be fine,” I wrote in May. “They’ll both be safe.”

Then Lamar put his attacks into overdrive with a calculated military-level lyrical invasion that targeted every weak spot Drake had. Sure, other rappers had called him corny. But Lamar prodded at every blemish with pinpoint accuracy. At the heart of the attacks was the assertion that Drake didn’t actually belong to Black American culture. He’s an outsider. And the knockout blow was “Not Like Us,” a chart-topping anthem that questioned Drake’s relationships with underage girls, called him a colonizer and, quite frankly, made him look uncool. Even as Lamar secured his victory, it felt like Drake would bounce back. All he’d need was one hit, right?

But Lamar didn’t stop.

There was the “Not Like Us” video, the “Pop Out” concert on Juneteenth, the Super Bowl halftime show announcement and the promise that thousands in attendance and millions at home would be screaming “A minor” in unison, and the surprise album, GNX, full of new hits and more reasons to celebrate Lamar. One thing all of those moments had in common was they featured groups of people — community — large crowds in Compton, California, Crips and Bloods on stage, bands from historically Black colleges and universities playing the songs. They all joined together to make fun of Drake to the point that clowning Drake became cool. Even brands and social media influencers thirsty to get a piece of hip-hop’s swag saw Drake as low-hanging fruit.

And with each day, it felt less and less inevitable that Drake would be able to brush it all off with his next hit, largely due to his own miscues. His final rebuttal, “The Heart Part 6” was as ill-conceived a diss record as he could have produced, full of inaccuracies about Lamar’s music and an unbelievable attempt at creating a narrative that he planted information to Lamar’s camp. Drake would then release gigabytes of content as a throwaway that didn’t move the needle. He haphazardly put out loose tracks that sometimes sounded great (“No Face” is one of his best songs this year) but didn’t catch on in the way his songs usually can, even when they’re just tossed out to the public. For instance, his 2021 EP Scary Hours 2 dropped out of nowhere and still managed to chart, with “Wants and Needs” peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. These may seem like quibbles or overreactions because Drake hasn’t tried to put out a fully fleshed out single aimed at chart dominance yet, but these moments matter.

Rap battles, like political battles, are often won in the margins. Small demographic deteriorations can doom an entire campaign. A neighborhood in Pennsylvania can turn the whole state. A misstep in a small town in Wisconsin can ruin everything. For Drake, he’s been slipping within the margins for some time now.

When he started insinuating that Megan Thee Stallion lied about getting shot by Tory Lanez, as well as palling up with the fellow Canadian rapper, it chipped away at his Black female fan base that has bolstered so much of his success. The ghostwriting allegations that have followed him for years have hurt his standing among some of the same hip-hop purists now rallying around Lamar’s authenticity and penmanship. And, yes, the weird exchanges with underage girls were off-putting to some segments of his base as well. These detractions weren’t enough to dent Drake’s total popularity before this year. Still, they matter when presented with a unifying entity — in this case, Lamar — that laid out all the reasons to hate Drake in clever, catchy, sometimes hilarious rhymed couplets and chants.

And now Drake has delivered a self-inflicted death knell that betrays the rapper’s history as the same uber-calculated, genius battler who crushed Meek Mill to dust in his closed fist. Two weeks ago, Drake filed two complaints against his own record label, Universal Music Group, for artificially boosting “Not Like Us” and for promoting the song that he claims spread false allegations about him. Beyond that, the optics are that Drake didn’t like losing and effectively called the police on a Black man. In a feud that’s based on Drake’s relationship to his Blackness and that he’s a hip-hop interloper, filing a legal complaint about words said during a rap battle is alienating an action as Drake could have executed. While Drake has been meme’d and joked about throughout his career, the vitriol has never been to the extent of what we’ve seen these past few weeks.

The belief has always been that Drake is just one hit away from making people forget about it all – the diss records, the accusations, the corniness. But I’m not sure if that’s the case anymore. We’re entering the aftermath of a feud that looks closer to the lopsided beating 50 Cent delivered to Ja Rule in early 2000s, effectively ending his superstar run than the competitive back-and-forth between Jay-Z and Nas that helped elevate both of their careers. It’s one-sided, with the tide turning further against a megastar than anticipated. Sadly, so many of the problems are of Drake’s own doing. Lamar performed a masterful takedown of one of rap’s biggest stars, but he also capitalized on Drake’s own refusal to address and fix some of the issues that were already bubbling below the surface. Now, the road to recovery is rockier than ever, and Drake’s future is in doubt. What once seemed like a roadblock looks increasingly like a ditch that will take real work for rap’s once-biggest star to dig himself out of.

Nobody could have seen this coming. 

Except for maybe Mos Def, of course.