From Drake 'Til Dawn: Official Diss Response
Connecting Drake to the Swedish metal band Dawn in 6 degrees of separation, Kevin Bacon-style
Welcome to my new feature: “From Drake ‘Til Dawn,” where I connect the latest in Drake news to the Swedish extreme metal band Dawn in 6 degrees of separation, Kevin Bacon-style.
I feel like I’m not a music journalist if I don’t chime in on the Drake diss. I don’t know what to think about it, though. Every thought I’ve had has already been posted, debated, dismantled, and somehow used as definitive evidence of Hollywood’s Satanistic cabal. The memes move too fast for my decaying brain to process. I’d notice another gray hair in the black mirror if I ever hit lock screen.
I still haven’t listened to the song. It’s not on streaming services, maybe because of the Biggie sample that supposedly is in at least one of the two beats, or maybe because it’s A.I. I have read the lyrics multiple times, and I know exactly how it sounds, because Drake has always been a little bit A.I. It’s a catchy pop hit, exactly like “Ether,” and a few of the lines are more brutalizing and witty than I’d expect from BBL Drizzy. “Metro shut your h*e ass up and make some drums” is simplistic dismissive brilliance. As is, perhaps incidentally, “I don’t care what Cole thinks.”
My natural bias is toward Kendrick as an overall artist, but I am enjoying the return of mainstream poetic sparring as much as any old man, and thus have to stand and clap emoji clap emoji clap emoji for Drake’s winning round 1 performance. Poetic justice has been served.
I don’t want to talk about the Drake diss, though. There’s literally nothing else left to be said. I want to talk about Beef.
Without listening to either song, both Drake’s diss and Mos Def’s “Beef” have been stuck in my head for the past week. If our nonexistent attention spans can possibly recall a previous Ubiquitous Fleeting Moment, Yasiin Bey went viral a couple months ago for saying on a podcast that Drake’s music isn’t real hip-hop, it’s pop made for shopping at Target.
The same type of people who will type “Once K.dot talks about Drake’s monstrous dick over free jazz samples it’s all over” will find it easy to ridicule Yasiin’s opening line “Beef is not what Jay said to Nas / Beef is when the working folks can’t find jobs.” Yasiin is correct in his analysis of Drake’s music: it is diametrically opposed to his own. Kendrick’s is too, honestly (to Drake). It’s why this whole current battle doesn’t make a ton of logical sense. It feels like the election. A shitstorm we don’t really want to be involved with but can’t look away from, even as we’ve already reluctantly chosen one side or the other.
The controversy between Yasiin and Drake never progressed farther than a podcast couch, I don’t think. Both what the brief controversy failed to reconcile is that Mos Def’s “Beef” and Drake’s “Push Ups” can both exist. They don’t have to be antagonistic toward each other.
“Beef” is an inherently funny word. I don’t know the exact science, but I recall some sketch comedy writer/teachers saying that words that begin and/or end with hard consonants naturally tend to get bigger laughs than words with vowels or soft consonants. “Poop” is funnier than “Shit.” “Beef” is funnier than “Battle,” because it has hard consonants on both ends.
Naming a song “Beef” has always been funny to me. It’s a funny way to describe a rap battle. It’s also funny when Yasiin recontextualizes it and makes it about social issues, even if making light of serious topics is something people should only do at Target.
This song isn’t as mind-expanding as Yasiin probably hopes it is, but when it came out sometime in the early 2000s—As Blackstar, Yasiin and Talib Kweli performed “What’s Beef?” on Chappelle’s Show in 2003, including the verse and beat from the “freestyle” version that came out on the compilation album Mos Definite in 2007 (
)—it did help put a lot of the performative battling of the era into perspective.
As corny as being earnest can feel nowadays, in that time period Yasiin did provide a necessary underground counterweight to the mainstream flashy materialism. Beef like Jay-Z vs. Nas, a carryover from Tupac vs. Biggie, “made headlines” before that phrase became “went viral.” That detracted from the real issues that hadn’t been resolved since Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five put out “The Message.”
Shit-talking is inherently dangerous, and I’ve been naive in the past about some disses that I thought were confined to musical recordings but spilled over into real-life violence. No one seems to anticipate that happening with Drake or Kendrick, but there’s always a possibility that someone will take something a little too personal. Messages like Yasiin’s in “Beef” are grounding reminders of the transient pointlessness of hip-hop feuds.
It appears at least one other YouTube commenter was reminded of this track because of a Drake beef, albeit his spat with Meek Mill eight years ago, which I completely forgot about until now.
These seemingly PR-orchestrated Drake beefs are fun at all, but the Yasiins and 2024 Meek Mills and desperate Twitter nobodies inevitably chime in to remind people of the real horrors affecting humanity outside of the hip-hop kayfabe, even if Meek is still getting railed by the media in different ways from multiple directions (Yes Diddy).
Like “Push Ups” and “Beef,” another song that’s been stuck in my head without me listening to it at all is Mike Jones and Hurricane Chris’ 2009 classic “Drop & Gimme 50.”
This song isn’t exactly the way I imagine Drake’s “Push Ups” “hook” sounds, but repeatedly saying “Top say drop, you better drop and give ‘em 50” over and over in my head has transformed in translation, like editions of The Bible, into Hurricane Chris saying “drop and gimme 50 drop drop and gimme 50 drop and gimme 50 drop drop and gimme 50.”
This otherwise forgotten song has relodged itself in my brain, like a long lost roommate who disappeared one drunken night but barged back in nearly two decades later, popped a hot pocket in the microwave and nodded ‘sup’ as if nothing’s changed. I’m still not sure if it’s about a stripper doing pushups or what, but it still goes hard.
Mike Jones was one of the most important artists to me at a formative age. The gimmick of the open phone line propelled him, the hits sustained him, and then he vanished. But he served, for my generation, as a gateway to Houston’s legacy. Through him, derided as he came to be from the then-oldheads, we arrived at DJ Screw, Lil Keke, et al.
Hurricane Chris is almost exactly analogous to his co-feature on this track. The J Cole to Mike Jones’ Drake, if you will. You like one or the other, and if you’re more of a Yasiin, you don’t like either. Sneering “A Bay Bay” in the hallways was as in-fashion as white tees & Nikes in 2007. He had a comparable hit rate and as swift of a fall off.
Together, “Drop & Gimme 50” was their greatest achievement. Apparently it came out on Mike Jones’ second album, The Voice, which also featured the classic “Cuddy Buddy.” That album title and these two songs were entirely forgettable until they randomly popped in my head. They were important for a time, and still good with nostalgic hindsight, but they didn’t have lasting power to grow and age with me.
Mike Jones and Hurricane Chris are still around but their musical legacies are frozen in a bygone era. When someone my age says “Mike Jones,” someone younger probably says “WHO?”, and means it.
WHO? Lupe Fiasco. WHO?
It’s fascinating to see which artists have lasting relevance.
My freshman year of high school, I talked to a friend about the phenomenon of one-hit wonders. Bubba Sparxxx’ “Ms. New Booty” (bonus Kevin Bacon-like connection here back to Mos Def “Ms. Fat Booty”) was one of the most popular songs at the time. Nothing was more important to a 14-year-old anxious ball of hormones than a booty booty booty booty, rocking everywhere. We loved it, but knew that Bubba would never give us anything better, no matter how hard he tried to “Heat It Up.” I made a mental note to check back in when I was a senior, to see if I still remembered “Ms. New Booty” at all. Of course, by making this mental note, I did remember the song, and I still do. There’s still not much more important than booty booty booty booty, rocking everywhere and dropping and giving 50, except of course, I must note, the type of Beef Yasiin talks about.
Around when I was remembering “Ms. New Booty” and graduating high school, Drake really started to pop off. I remember sending his Myspace to a friend who responded, “Yeah, so?” and I felt a deep sense of shame and regret for even considering enjoying this Target shopping music. The guy from Degrassi became a mega superstar fairly quickly, and he’s stayed there. I wouldn’t put him in any Big 3, or top 5, but it’s impossible to argue now that he’s not qualified to be in these conversations. He appeals to his fan base, and that’s fine. It’s not unsurprising that he outlasted Mike Jones and Hurricane Chris, or even—in a different way—Yasiin. He has that star power. That Jimmy Fallon type charisma you either love or hate.
What’s strangest to me is that Lupe Fiasco is somehow, perhaps just in niche circles, still held in high regard. I was there when Lupe skated onstage with Kanye at Lollapalooza 2008. I was there when he got pissed that the crowd at Champaign’s Follinger Auditorium knew every word to “Superstar” before its official release. I’m the James Murphy of Lupe appreciation goddamnit. I WAS THERE!
I didn’t think he’d still be here, though. Food & Liquor was better than Who Is Mike Jones? and The Cool was far better than The Voice, but Lasers was Lasers. I tuned out, and assumed everyone else did too. For a while it feels like he was a New Age weirdo conspiracy theorist or something, but who isn’t?
Like 50-year-old Ricky Rozay snapping back at his longtime collaborator, Lupe ranted onstage at Coachella that he’d battle rap anyone. At first I thought it was a desperate attempt from a washed up rapper to gain a modicum of relevance from this ongoing media frenzy. Some people whose opinions about music I trust seem to agree that he could win. Lupe does feel cut from a bygone era, more true to his roots than anyone from Chicago who experienced a similar level of success. When he responded to someone’s warning that he better be careful since there are wolves out there by saying “what’s a wolf to a third house?”, I knew the slick wordplay of his west side upbringing hadn’t shed a bit.
Lupe is a flabbergasting case study. He was always more of a Yasiin, but “Kick Push” and “Superstar” kick pushed him into Drake-like superstardom. That moment in the limelight was fleeting, like Mike Jones and Hurricane Chris, but sometime circa 2012, when Food & Liquor II came out, he ditched the attempts at glossy pop shimmer and reverted back to lyrical grit. I still can’t imagine anyone in 2024 is really still a hardcore Lupe Fiasco fan, who truly believes he could bar-for-bar outrap Kendrick. I can’t believe anyone’s really still a hardcore Drake fan either, though. So I guess I can believe it all. I would love to see it, and I’m glad that by clicking on trolling Lupe Fiasco tweets he has reappeared in my algorithm.
The CEO of Heineken — Dolf van den Brin
By clicking on Lupe Fiasco tweets, I was served this one saying the President of Heineken is “a dear brother” of his. So that’s why he supports the brand, despite being Muslim. They made a non-alcoholic beer that he drinks. Non-alcoholic beer is getting more and more popular. J Cole and Drake are both like non-alcoholic beers. They taste familiar but off (Yes Diddy).
Heineken is a Dutch brand, and the CEO is from the Netherlands. Which leads me to…
Dawn is a Swedish metal band. I know absolutely nothing about them, aside from that. If this turns out to be Kanye/Burzum situation, I apologize. “The Knell and the World” isn’t a song I’d recommend, but it is the top result for “Dawn Swedish Band” on YouTube. The connection here is that I’m a dumbass American who thought the Netherlands and Sweden were the same place. They basically are, in that they’re white ass European kingdoms that are members of the Council of Europe, NATO, and the European Union.
Like Drake and Kendrick and Drake and Rick Ross and Drake and everyone he’s been dissing, The Netherlands have been both on the same side and against each other in various wars. They’re cool with each other now, like Drake and Kendrick and everyone likely will be in a few weeks, when this all blows over.
Thanks for tuning in. I’ll be back with more From Drake ‘Til Dawn next time. I hope this made some degree of sense and if not, I’m sorry.