This last week in rap beef seems divinely inspired—almost too perfect to be true. Meek Mill, a former Philly battle rapper, who spent the second half of last year in jail for toting glocks, has been bodied by the softest “singing nigga” in the rap game. Twice.
Last week Meek Mill infamously Tweeted that people should stop comparing him to Drake because Drake “don’t write his on raps”. The comment initially had Meek boasting on Twitter, owning his comment and stirring the pot with further slander saying that Drake didn’t tweet his album, Dreams Worth More Than Money, because his team found out that Drake used a ghost writer for his verse on ‘R.I.C.O.’. “If I woulda knew I woulda took took him off the album” he goes on, even naming a dude, Quentin Miller, as the ghost writer.
Since then, nothing was the same. At the time, Drake lived out The lyrics: “Diss me and you’ll never hear a reply for it“. Postulation was rife as to how much weight Meek’s comment held. Did Drake really not write his own raps? If so, who had really started from the bottom. Who was running through the 6 with their woes? Some didn’t care. Some cited his most brilliant songwriting as proof that regardless of whether he had used a ghost writer, The Boy still had it in him. And some, pointed out that Quentin Miller couldn’t be a cotdamn ‘ghost’ writer if he’d been publicly credited.
From then on, the internet turned on Meek for looking like a tattling child. Years of Drake-bashing has left the internet desensitised to it to the point where mocking him is an in-joke. Even his fans will post pictures saying ‘Drake the type to return ice cubes to their natural environment’. Drake-bashing is old hat. He’s weathered to this shit now and everyone knows it. He’s already embraced a partially deprecated social image for so long that nothing more can tarnish him now.
Drake was all set to continue living by his lyrics when Funk Master Flex named himself the champion of the Drizzy lynch mob. This persuasively condemning reference track for ’10 Bands’ by Quentin Miller—who had by then excused himself from the table for fear of being served beef—was let loose, and so was ‘Charged Up’.
The diss track had industry lit. Wheelchair Jimmy had stood up for himself and dived head first into rap beef. He’d previously gone in on Tyga and Chris Brown but they were merely mentions. The last time he got in the booth purely to ether someone was his tiff with Common and that didn’t go too well for him. ‘Charged Up’ was different. The song undoubtedly puts Meek in the cross-hairs and does it with class. It addresses that Meek should be focussing on larger social issues, and touts admirably fuego lyrical content.
Simple lines like “Tell DJ Cue to drop a bomb on this shit” often hold more gravitas than immediately apparent. The line references the famous beef between DJs Clue and Flex, while addressing Flex’s tirade on himself, and paralleling Kendrick’s line on his war-declaring ‘Control Verse’. For anyone who hasn’t listened to Hot 97, there’s also that thing Flex does where he drops bomb soundbites on ever thing he introduces. Equivalently devious lines punctuate Drake repeating the song’s titular line, “I’m charged up” in the least agro way imaginable. It’s also possibly the only diss track to sound like a love song.
This was only a couple of days ago. Drake had successfully handed Meek an L and was enjoying a spectacular view from the 6. Funk Master Flex had hyped up a diss track from Meek that dissipated into Meek dropping a sound bite on twitter of himself laughing. He’d gone on Twitter to call ‘Charged Up’, “Baby lotion soft”, so going 100-0 real quick essentially just made him look like a pussy.
But maybe Drake’s recent proximity to Future rubbed off as he went beast mode, dropping a new track ‘Back to Back’.
The scoreboard now shows Drake with two songs, and ‘Tweet Mill’ with a handful of jabs on social media. The track is a startlingly acute blow to Meek’s pride and career. The best lines go like this:
“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 /Yeah, trigger fingers turn to twitter fingers / Yeah, you gettin’ bodied by a singin’ nigga /I’m not the type of nigga that’ll type to niggas / And shout-out to all my boss bitches wife-in niggas / Make sure you hit him with the prenup / Then tell that man to ease up / I did another one, I did another one / You still ain’t did shit about the other one”
And had everyone going like this:
Drake didn’t have to do him like that. He could have won and walked away. He already had the “perfect start to the summer”, but Drake (being Drake) just had to get caught up in his feelings and drop lines alleging Meek and Nicki’s breakup, which is far from his place to comment on. As well as eschewing that high road he talked about on ‘Charged Up’, it also just makes shit awkward for her. Throwing jabs at your mate’s bf is high school level petty—something that Drake seems to be a king at. That line: ‘you gon’ make me buy bottles for Charlamagne’—that implies that Drake should buy bottles for his known hater at Hot 97, Charlamagne the God, because he trashed Meek’s response—it happened. As the song was coming out, Charlamagne took to Instagram to show that the 6 God had actually sent him 6 bottles of Dom Perignon. There’s levels to this shit.
If ever there was an opportune moment for Tweet Mill to sway public opinion, it would have been after ‘Back to Back’. Before then Meek was running around in the wilds of twitter with little to protect himself. In going in for the kill, Drake made the exact same mistake Hans Gruber did in Die Hard—he gave him a machine gun. Then ‘Wanna Know’ happened. The long-awaited ‘Wanna Know’ was a skit-heavy under-achievement that only had us wanting to know if Drake had really gotten pissed on. The ineffectual shot was only more enfeebled further by the person it was aimed at. Like, how hard is it to make fun of Drake? At a cursory glance, Meek had the world at his disposal. He wasn’t even pressed for time, after all it took Nas months to slam Jay Z with ‘Ether’.
But as I said before: Drake-bashing is old hat. The degree to which Drake is an iconoclastic runt of the rap game litter makes him look like easy lunch, but it’s actually his greatest strength. Drake didn’t have to do Meek like he did in ‘Back to Back’ because Drake didn’t have to do anything at all. In this beef he’s B-Rabbit to Meek’s Papa Doc—immune to any of the internet’s polemical platitudes because he’s already embraced his flaws. Even if the first time Meek moved from speaking off the record to, literally, speaking on it was a hot flamed onslaught like this, the fact remains that this is a beef that Meek Mill never could have won. If Drake was slayed on record by a Philly battle rapper fresh out of prison then that would only be business as usual. From Drake’s corner, it would even have been on-brand. He could have continued his Sorbent-soft approach and probably even written a song about how much Meek hurt his feelings and performed it as a self-aware skit on SNL. Virtually any outcome from this feud could only have bolstered Drake’s public image. Meek: if you’re reading this, you never had a chance.
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