<\/p>\n
\n\tBy now, the events of May 2024 have hardened into rap<\/a> mythology. As the story goes, someone close to Drake<\/a> leaked \u201cFamily Matters\u201d<\/a> to Kendrick Lamar<\/a> ahead of its release, allowing Kendrick to engineer the devastating one-two punch of \u201cMeet the Grahams\u201d and \u201cNot Like Us\u201d with near-cinematic precision. On the latter song, Kendrick is no longer battling Drake so much as narrating his death. \u201cI see dead people,\u201d he taunts on the song\u2019s opening line, transforming Drake from rap rival into corpse before the public had even processed what was happening.<\/p>\n \n\tKendrick\u2019s war with Drake \u2014 the rap battle<\/a> that refuses to end \u2014 was preoccupied with annihilation, the total elimination of Drake as a cultural figure. And for a time, it appeared to work. Allegations of pedophilia and grooming became permanently attached to his public image, chanted in arenas and clubs with ecclesiastical fervor. Worse still, Drake\u2019s lawsuit against UMG over the allegedly defamatory claims in \u201cNot Like Us\u201d appeared to violate<\/a> the unspoken rules of rap warfare itself, lending further legitimacy to the idea that, despite a nearly two-decade run atop rap\u2019s commercial hierarchy, Drake would always remain an outsider to \u201cthe culture.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAnd yet, two years later, Aubrey Graham has returned, freshly looksmaxxed and eager to settle old scores. There he is, stalking through snow-covered crime scenes and frozen wastelands in the slick, high-production visuals for the song \u201cWhisper My Name,\u201d<\/a> from his long-promised<\/a> new album, Iceman<\/em>. There he is again, raising a shot glass directly to camera while appearing to taunt A$AP Rocky: \u201cWhere she at?\/Where she go,\u201d he smirks on \u201cBurning Bridges.\u201d<\/a> He furnishes a gas canister to burn down an apparent bot farm in the music video for \u201cMake Them Know,\u201d<\/a> the production of which caused a small furor<\/a> in Toronto.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe three-album onslaught Drake released on Friday does more than attempt a comeback. It takes on the Herculean task of reframing the argument entirely. Beginning with the bruised and war-ready Iceman<\/em>, and culminating in the diasporic maximalism of Habibti<\/em> and Maid of Honour<\/em>, Drake delivers the kind of fluid, cross-genre musical exchange he mastered years ago with projects like 2017\u2019s More Life<\/em><\/a>. When he\u2019s at his best, this quality makes the rigid authenticity politics animating many of his critics sound like conservative nostalgia for a world of fixed borders. The deeper irony is that Drake, for all of his own questionable politics<\/a>, may be right in the end.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIn the mainstream, \u201cNot Like Us\u201d flattened into an easily legible shorthand for what the internet understood to be the Black consensus. The song reduced a sprawling and internally dynamic culture into something cleanly partitioned and morally coherent <\/strong>\u2014 an \u201cus\u201d versus a \u201cthem\u201d \u2014 the kind of framework white cultural institutions instinctively know how to reward.<\/p>\n \n\tDrake doesn\u2019t have to point this out explicitly to expose the contradiction. Take \u201cRan to Atlanta,\u201d featuring Future alongside the red-hot Southern California rapper Molly Santana, freshly independent after being signed to Victor Victor. While Kendrick\u2019s critique was never strictly about collaboration, \u201cNot Like Us\u201d ultimately reduced Drake\u2019s relationship to Atlanta into a simplistic morality play, one where the city functions as a symbol for an authentic Blackness Drake can only imitate from the outside. The problem is that Kendrick\u2019s historical framing barely withstands scrutiny. His vaguely folkloric language, conjuring \u201csettlers\u201d and \u201ctown folk,\u201d collapses a range of real anxieties into a simplistic, symbolic drama with Drake cast as the outsider villain. While far from the most compelling work Drake has made with Atlanta rappers, \u201cRan to Atlanta\u201d chips away at the faulty logic of his detractors. What distinguishes Drake\u2019s participation in Atlanta\u2019s musical ecosystem from the countless other artists, executives, media figures, and corporations who have profited from the city\u2019s cultural output for decades? And what does it mean that virtually no major Atlanta rapper publicly embraced Kendrick\u2019s framing?\u00a0<\/p>\n