A week ago, Meek Mill launched a war against Drake that he’s now failed to advance, much less win. On
Saturday, Drake dropped “Charged Up.” On Monday, Meek dropped a
self-deprecating Vine. This morning, Drake dropped his “Back To Back”
freestyle diss, and now he’s up by two to Meek’s zero.
With
Drake's OVO Fest coming up next week in Toronto, this is looking less
like a rap beef, and more like a victory lap for Drake.
How
is it that Meek Mill, a battle rapper from Philly, is getting rinsed by
a self-described “singing nigga” from Canada? When Meek called out
Drake for having employed obscure Atlanta rapper Quentin Miller
to co-write his guest verses and album cuts, he might’ve quickly
escalated the feud and overwhelmed Drake with a crippling diss track
aimed at his credibility, for one, and then all of his other known
vulnerabilities. Instead, he cowered. He pump-faked. Hot 97 host Funkmaster Flex
hyped Meek’s anticipated reply, but it never came. Instead, Meek has
wasted the past few days tweeting jokes and emojis, thus earning the
dismissive and unfortunate nickname “Tweet Mill.”
Meanwhile, Drake is slicing Meek’s throat with quotables. From “Back to Back”:
You
love her, then you gotta give the world to her/Is that a world tour or
your girl’s tour?/I know that you gotta be a thug for her/This ain’t
what she meant when she told you to open up more.
Trigger
fingers turn to twitter fingers/You getting bodied by a
singing nigga/I’m not the type of nigga that’ll type to niggas/And
shout-out to all my boss bitches wife-ing niggas.
I don’t wanna hear about this ever again/ Not even when she tell ‘em that they better as friends.
You still ain’t did sh*t about the other one.
What
strikes me as bizarre and ill-advised is that Meek initially challenged
Drake with (apparently) no immediate intention of dropping a diss track
bodying Drake with all due swiftness. As Drake complains on “Back to
Back,” “I waited four days, nigga, where y'all at?” Meek charged into
this battle with no plan and no practical appreciation for how the pace
of digital existence affects this sort of thing. In the meantime, Drake
has cozied up to Power 105 host Charlamagne tha God, a former foe, by buying him bottles of champagne hours after saying he would do so in song. Drake is outchea “living his raps,” Charlamagne noted this morning in an Instagram caption.
Drake
is playing chess with a luxurious palisander board and diamond-cut
pieces. Meek Mill isn’t playing chess, or even checkers; he’s playing
Connect Four. So far, it’s no contest.
We’re
a few years removed from the Drake who once swore, “Diss me; you’ll
never hear a reply for it.” Since 2012, he’s humiliated Common and Tyga, and he’s feuded subtly with Jay Z, Kendrick Lamar, and Pusha T.
No, Drake hasn’t decisively won each of these feuds—his
passive-aggressive nature prevents it, in many cases—but he has, in
fact, demonstrated an industry savvy and tactical brilliance that Meek
clearly lacks. When it comes to rap beef, Meek Mill isn’t so
distinguished; he narrowly won his feud with Cassidy (of all
people), and he picked a fight with Kendrick that, in retrospect,
presaged the miscalculations that Meek would eventually make in
confronting Drake.
We tried to warn him. The
full force of Meek’s credibility as a street rapper is, so far, no
match for Drake’s unmatched influence, foresight, and general
popularity. Diss songs aside, Drake even broke us off with “Hotline
Bling,” a minor, piña colada-flow ditty to underscore that none of this
authenticity angst really matters so long as he keeps the hits
coming. "I’m not sure what it was that really made y'all mad,“ Drake
raps on "Back to Back,” his most scathing and explicit diss yet. “But I
guess this is what I gotta do to make y'all rap.”
Meek: if you’re reading this, it’s too late.
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