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If Hot 97 radio host Ebro Darden is to be believed, somewhere out there, on someone’s hard drive, there might be a version of Drake’s monster 2018 hit “Nice for What” featuring a West verse. Instead, it’s mostly tiresome, frustrating, and lacking in high stakes. The occasion of new music from West and Drake should be a thrilling and compelling moment. These albums do not represent the best work these two are capable of, not by a mile.

With their new albums, Certified Lover Boy and Donda, respectively, they’re making their argument in music but also in melodrama. For West, it’s time to scale the genre up - way up. The two men who helped hip-hop become the dominant form of pop music are at it again, and this time they’re in conflict about where hip-hop goes from here. For a decade, the two men have been orbiting each other, sometimes jockeying for the top spot in friendly competition, other times having inexplicably petty fights.

“He’s the guy I’ll tell my kids about,” Drake told People magazine in 2010. From an artist with an ego like West’s, they are bitter truths admitted reluctantly, made sharper by the fact that Drake has openly talked about how West has been the major influence of his career. In 2015, he admitted Drake might speak to younger people in a more direct way than he does.įrom anyone else, these admissions could be seen as matter-of-fact, or even coming to grips with reality. “Let's be honest - he got last summer,” West told GQ in 2014. But over the past decade, West has been forced to repeatedly admit that Drake has outshone him. Kanye happens to you he finds a way to sneak in above the fold of whatever news outlet you’re reading. He’s made a career of extracting attention, often without the permission of the audience. West is gifted at directing all available eyeballs to him, and, from time to time, his work, too.

If this is upsetting to Drake’s detractors, imagine how infuriating it must be for Kanye West. The list of records he has broken is wild, but let’s perhaps zero in on one: In January 2021, Drake became the first artist to pass 50 billion streams on Spotify. Earlier this year, he was given Billboard’s Artist of the Decade award, and you could hardly think of another name on the short list. When people called him soft, he sang softer (“You gettin’ bodied by a singin’ nigga!” he taunted Meek Mill). He memed himself before his enemies memed him. Even when he faced attacks that would be fatal to another rapper’s career - over the corniness, or the Canadianness, or the identity-hopping - he’s managed to turn all of those into positions of strength. But since his third mixtape, 2009’s So Far Gone, Drake has not missed. I mean, where the fuck should I really even start? Perhaps with a thought experiment: Has any rapper been as popular as Drake for as long as Drake? Has any rapper had such a total and complete grip on the charts the way Drake has, for as long as he has? If you’re generous, Jay-Z’s 2000–2006 run might compare.