Has there ever been as clear a loser as Drake? When his long-standing cold war with Kendrick Lamar turned into a full-on feud, this past spring, the stakes seemed relatively low. Both artists appeared immune from actual consequence, a pair of megastars playing chicken with Monopoly money. Lamar, a Pulitzer Prize recipient and the winner of seventeen Grammys, is rap’s de-facto laureate, a linguistic prodigy with a love of free jazz and theatrical concept albums. Drake, on the other hand, is an unflagging hitmaker with as many No. 1 singles as Michael Jackson, a genre-fluid Lothario whose forays into nineties R. & B., Caribbean dancehall, and U.K. grime have come to define the contemporary pop-music canon. Despite representing different factions within hip-hop, the pair have spent a decade indirectly jockeying for position as their generation’s greatest rapper. But in March, a few months after J. Cole claimed, on Drake’s song “First Person Shooter,” that he, Drake, and Lamar were the “big three,” Lamar voiced his resentment on a guest verse for Future and Metro Boomin, asserting that “it’s just big me.” So began the months-long Drake-Lamar dispute (Cole quickly bowed out), which culminated in “Not Like Us,” Lamar’s knockout blow. The song, with sing-along refrains about Drake being a pedophile, and its supplementary materials—a didactic music video and a live-streamed concert—solidified Lamar as the victor. For a diss track, it has achieved a level of unthinkable popularity: last month, California used it as one of its state songs during the Democratic National Convention roll call.
While Drake lobbed insults about his rival’s height, bank account, and inability to make hits—your standard rap-beef trigger points—Lamar painted a damning portrait of Drake’s humanity. Those pedophilia claims? Unsubstantiated, sure—but what about that time a fourteen-year-old Millie Bobby Brown admitted that Drake texted her, “I miss you so much”? Or the resurfaced clip of him kissing a seventeen-year-old onstage? (Drake brushed aside these claims on “The Heart Part 6,” rapping, “If I was fucking young girls, I promise I’d have been arrested / I’m way too famous for this shit you just suggested.”) When Lamar chastised Drake as being a deadbeat dad and a “colonizer,” the Internet dug up receipts corroborating the account. Six years have passed since Pusha T spurned Drake for “hiding a child” and not being “black enough,” barbs that left an indelible mark on his reputation. Lamar pressed deeper into these tensions until he drew blood, depicting Drake as a gambling addict and a pathological liar whose own friends revile him; a womanizing man-child whose insecurities have led him to cosmetic surgery and substance abuse; a soap-opera actor turned pop star cosplaying as a rapper and a thug.
In the past, stars searching for a narrative reset likely would’ve looked to a national magazine profile, a “Saturday Night Live” hosting spot, or a Netflix documentary. But, in 2024, Drake has landed on the modern solution of flooding the Internet with content. Last month, he released a documentary-cum-data dump, 100 Gigs for Your Headtop, a low-tech Web site with a list of alphabetized folders featuring new music, unused promotional material, and nearly eighteen hours of behind-the-scenes footage dating back to 2010. (Recently, he uploaded more content to the site, much of it from recording sessions for the 2013 album “Nothing Was the Same.”) Although the clips are bunched into loosely organized groups, there’s no shape or structure to them, no clear way to discern what matters and what doesn’t. In the first dump, we see Drake as an attentive father, walking with his toddler across an empty stage; we also see him as a caring friend, dapping up his bros and saying he loves them. Other clips depict him as an obsessive artist, poring over every detail, incapable of leaving the studio, and as a benevolent and jovial kingpin with a private plane and a distressing amount of tracksuits, a hookah always smoldering. When women appear, they’re strippers counting money in the club or dancers doing choreography to Drake songs. In the subsequent dump, which features content from a few years prior, we see a charming, idealistic version of Drake, a wide-eyed kid desperate to actualize his greatness.
This content is, of course, not designed to be consumed as a whole. (The deluge calls to mind a plotline from the first season of “Veep,” in which Vice-President Selina Meyer orders a “partial full disclosure” of the documents in her office, with the knowledge that the press will never be able to look through all of them.) Stars from Taylor Swift to Morgan Wallen to Post Malone have deployed similar strategies to reach cultural ubiquity: thirty-song albums with several deluxe editions, elongated world tours, and enough new content to remain top of mind, all the time, in the popular imagination. Perhaps as a result, audiences have come to expect saturation and resent more careful curation. (Frank Ocean, for example, has released two albums in twelve years, exiling himself from this culture of constant exposure despite being one of pop’s most celebrated stars; fans frequently take to social media to lament the lack of new material.)
Drake’s 100 Gigs seems modelled on the “photo dump,” a mode of social-media posting that’s popular for its appeals to authenticity. On Instagram, when influencers or celebrities—or anyone, really—posts a dump, the goal is to appear both ironically detached and dangerously cool, as if the content were thrown together without thought or consideration. This suggestive, fragmented presentation of self is what 100 Gigs captures: Drake positioning himself as genial and gracious, boisterous and beloved, so in on the joke he’s exempt from ever being the butt of it.
And yet what the dump does not communicate is the fabric of Drake’s inner life. In a collection of tour footage from the first dump, we see him lead prayer circles before taking the stage: “I’m gonna go out there and do exactly what you put me on this earth to do,” he tells God, as hired hands huddle around him. “Just take a seat and watch.” The rare dives into Drake’s psyche arrive during informal interviews with close collaborators like Noah (40) Shebib. He mentions his friend’s “psychotic” ambition, his maturation as an artist, and his pivot to more “aggressive” music, but he resists dissecting Drake further, even when gently prodded.
The clips dating back a decade do give rare glimpses into Drake’s creative process, as he crafts some of the finest material of his career. He writes and records the deep-cut favorites “Furthest Thing” and “Connect,” teases out verses for “Trophies” and “Who Do You Love?” The footage spotlights the depth of Drake’s talent—he sings and raps with blustery ease, landing on one inspired idea after another, making minute mixing decisions that click a song into focus. The more recent footage, however, reveals less about Drake as an artist. Almost every track he works on is already done, save for a tweak or a finishing touch. We do not see him write a verse or whittle his way toward a melody; only once does he sit and listen to prospective beats to record on. While working on “Scorpion,” he asks 40 to turn down Future’s ad-lib on the song “Blue Tint,” then nods along as another producer reviews the album’s mastering notes. During the “Her Loss” sessions, Drake and Lil Yachty vibe in the studio and talk about the magic of Yachty’s single “Poland.” Otherwise, much of the dump is a profound act of absence, with almost everything worth watching abandoned on a secret hard drive or not filmed at all.
It’s difficult to remember, but Drake’s early music was radically transparent, even relatable. On his first three commercial projects—“So Far Gone,” “Thank Me Later,” and “Take Care”—he unveiled personal flaws, romantic failures, and deep-seated insecurities between flex raps and bouts of overconfidence, creating an interplay of delicious contradiction. One moment, he’s one of “the realest niggas in the fucking game” (“She Will”); the next, he’s sobbing into a glass of rosé, begging an ex to come over (“Marvins Room”). Drake was also an inventive formalist, singing and rapping over hybrid production styles until every distinction dissolved into a singular whole. His latest records are neither relatable nor inventive—they’re dispatches from Hell. As one of the most famous humans alive, he presents himself as existing in a lofty realm: a Michael Corleone, isolated in his mansion, powerful and paranoid, clinging to his increasingly fragile empire. His last two albums, “Her Loss” and “For All the Dogs,” search for enemies everywhere—women, mostly, but also anyone who dares take Drake’s name in vain.
Last year, in an essay on fame, the novelist Rachel Kushner wrote, “You can encounter a celebrity but you cannot know one, because the very status of celebrity is born of image and of distance—of unknowability.” Like Drake’s recent music, much of 100 Gigs portends a tomb of unknowability, a cracked window into the life of an atomized idol. Although his diss tracks aimed at Lamar are some of the more invigorating songs he’s made in a while, they wilt in comparison with Lamar’s scorching character studies. Lamar is a ruthless examiner of identity, race, country, and religion. Applying this inquisitive lens to Drake led to brutal admonishments. “You raised a horrible fucking person,” Lamar raps to Drake’s father in an epistolary verse on the impressively petty “meet the grahams.” The pair may have begun their beef by feuding over who was the better rapper and the more definitive auteur, but Lamar’s victory was less a result of technical prowess than one of narrative ingenuity, leaving listeners to imagine Drake alone on his estate, surrounded by riches yet ridden with shame. 100 Gigs mostly confirms this message, casting a sidelong look into how a burgeoning star lost himself in the specious and solitary world of intractable celebrity. ♦