Drake memes belong in museums more than most sculptures
If the dinosaur-killing meteor ever comes back, or we finally run out of ice caps, the only surviving artifact of our civilization will be Drake memes. Starting as a subsection of general memedom, the Drake meme has taken on a life of its own.
Skyrocketing past its peers to the point that in 2015 the term “Drakeposting” started trending. This Canadian’s bone structure has been tweeted, toked and messaged across our phones for over a decade now. This makes him, and his memes, a person of interest from an art historical perspective. Drake memes are intriguing not just for their weird sacredness, but also for what they tell us about the evolving attitudes of the public and how we view celebrities, especially men.
Starting From the Bottom
In truth, the origins of the Drake meme can easily be traced back to misogyny and racial stereotyping from rap fans. As most of us know, prior to his rap career, he starred in the teen classic “Degrassi.” He publicly declared his reason for leaving was to pursue a rap career, and when he began to release music in 2009, it was in stark contrast to his contemporaries.
At the time the biggest rappers in the game were people like 50 Cent and Lil Wayne. Guys who were talking about how great they are, how much money they have and how lucky anyone would be to be in their orbit. Then comes Drake saying the same thing, but also openly discussing his feelings and that women are more than just set deck for your music videos. Early Drake is similar to early Kanye in that he allowed himself to come off as dorkier and more honest. He wasn’t trying to fill the harsh blinged out gangster image that rappers had become synonymous with, which made him come off as more approachable and attractive to female fans. And their interest, turned potential male fans away from him.
Soon the early Drake talking points were formed. He was supposedly soft, pandering and performative. From today’s eyes, the Drake controversy looked a lot like the Twilight phenomena that was happening at the same time. Here’s this thing that women and young girls express intense attraction to, and then their male counterparts come in using the language of formal criticism to communicate weak and subjective arguments. Some skipped that and straight up admitted Drake was bad because women found him attractive. And if there’s one sin that a male celebrity in the late 2000s can do wrong, it’s be attractive to women in a way that doesn’t adhere perfectly to patriarchy.
And this male annoyance is reflected in the earliest Drakeposting we see. Most of it is what you would expect. Jokes about how the kid who was in the wheelchair on Degrassi is trying to be a hardened rapper now. But nonetheless a president was set. The meme would be about someone, usually Drake, being for lack of a better term a try hard. The joke is that Drake is clawing to be within a circle that he does not belong in. Essentially Drake was being portrayed as the Urkel of the black celebrity world.
A clear example of this was the 2010 clip of Drake with up-and-coming Basketball star Demarcus Cousins. Admittedly, the difference in both men’s reactions is pretty funny. But to men at the time, the joke is that Drake looked gay. Or that he was a biracial person who’s trying to force his way into hanging out with “real” black people. Terribly aged language that goes to show where most of his trolls’ minds were at this time, along with the years to come.
This same energy followed him into 2011 and early 2012. Drake was continuing his more tender and explicitly lonely tracks. And the jokes continued to pour about him being soft. This birthed the “Drake’s the type of guy…” memes that have been popular as of late.
People would start a tweet with that phrase, and then follow it up with something that Drake would supposedly do. Along with a lot of clowning on his song “Marvin’s Room.” One of, if not his biggest, songs about romance and sexual insecurity. So, as you can guess, it brought along at least three different memes that trended at the time.
A Twist
All of this memeing did result in some unexpected irony. See, algorithms don’t care why you are posting about something, just that you’re posting about it. So, all of this talking about Drake, just told the bots at Twitter that people like to talk about Drake. And soon his face was all over the site. This along with some of his songs hitting the charts, and some dating rumors forming about him and mega pop star Rihanna quickly overshadowed the Drake hate.
This was the start of Drake’s party era. His songs moved away from his insecurities and were now more about him being rich. However, he still released occasional love ballads that keep his female audience strongly attached. And as such a lot of his memes were about how he was rich and hot. One of the biggest ones being “Happy Drake vs Sad Drake,” from which came many laughs.
However, Drake had not hit the peak of meme mountain yet. He hadn’t yet shaken off the try hard accusations he had gotten from the beginning of his career. This is reflected in the memes we see of 2013 and 2014. In particular the “No new friends” meme. There still was this tendency to laugh at Drake and not with Drake. And so, he decided to get in on the joke, and it was one of the smartest decisions any musician has ever made.
In October of 2015, Drake released the video for the single “Hotline Bling”. A song in which Drake raps about how he’s super salty over a girl who has clearly moved on, and in the video he dances like someone is trying to do sign language and hit the nae-nae at the same time. This video was inescapable for at least a year and a half. This is the meme that invented the term “Drakeposting.”
The fact that this was a video was good because image memes were out, but Vine-style memes were still in. Also, the fact that he was on a pretty plain background helped it out a lot, as people got really imaginative with where they took this. And they took it everywhere, from SNL to your mom’s Facebook. People who would have never cared to know Drake before this were now clueing into what this man did next.
Highest highs…
And Drake rode this wave for years. People were so high off of the Hotline Bling momentum that virtually anything Drake did became a meme. If he checked his phone at the club, boom — meme.
If he had a conversation with a friend, boom — meme.
Even him just reacting to sports the same way anyone would, you guessed it — meme.
Some even proved profitable. Like in 2016, for a joint single, he and Future posted their high school photos. And something totally unexpected happened. It became a meme.
…and the lowest lows
This time period was a harsh pendulum swing from where we started. Drake went from universally hated to universally loved and then back to hated because of his beef with Pusha T. For a heavy assortment of reasons, Drake publicly did not like Pusha T. From his perspective this was probably fine. Since “Hotline Bling” he had dipped his toe into the more traditional hard rapper persona. And had gotten into a ton of public beef with other rappers, all of whom would just ignore him and not give him the time of day, but Pusha T clearly had the time.
He made a track where he poked the bear, and in response Pusha Dropped “The Story of Adidon.” This track not only stopped Drake’s momentum, but also destroyed the good graces he had built over the years. This did it in three keyways.
Firstly, Pusha T exposed that Drake had a secret son that he was only half claiming behind close doors, which put a bad taste in the mouth of his female audience who he had been behind him from the beginning. The Drake “Lover Boy” persona was now dead and buried. Secondly, it revived the whole “Drake is trying to be black, but he isn’t” thing. Pusha T used an image of Drake doing blackface as the cover of the track. And the music is from Jay-Z’s “The Story of O.J.” OJ of course being a man notorious for only wanting to be viewed as black when it was going to keep him out of jail.
Thirdly, it showed off Drake’s lackluster abilities as a rapper. Drake is by no means bad, but he’s also not the best. However, to his audience base, he was the best because they hadn’t been exposed to many other rappers aside from him. So, seeing this rap battle opened their eyes to the truth that this man they praised as a GOAT was a mere billy.
Speaking of billies — Millie. In particular Millie Bobby Brown. We’ve entered the dark era of Drake. The songs were fine, he didn’t really take a hit relevance wise. But respect wise, Drake was no longer indestructible. More and more information came out about Drake’s dating habits. And the fact that he tended to DM very young female actress, such as Millie Bobby Brown. The Drake memes of this time took on a more angry, disgusted attitude. His previously adoring female fans began to view his behavior as “nice guy”-esque.
Famous grips were the way he talked about Rihanna, but then turned to work with her former abuser, Chris Brown. Or how he constantly talked about wanting to settle down and support a woman, but then he hooked up with a different Insta model every weekend. Which, no hate to the models, that’s fully a Drake thing.
The reign of the Drake memes was close to dying, and was virtually dormant from 2020-2021, but luckily TikTok came along. In 2022, Drake released his own album “Honestly, Nevermind” as well as a collaborative album “Her Loss” with 21 Savage. The return of the Drake is gay memes came about.
But not gay in a negative way, gay in a girlies sort of way. The new storyline was that Drake really badly wanted to be cute, flirty and one of the girls, despite a very cishet persona. In a way, it was the same as when he first had a largely female fan base. Only now Drake was firmly pushed into your straight guy friend who thinks he has more game than he does zone. And from that, this glorious image was born.
Time will only tell where the Drake meme goes next. His memes not only detail the ups and lows of his career, but also, the ways feminisms, and the women’s perspective, effects rap music. In truth women own Drake’s career. When they are on his side his memes are good. When they are not on his side his memes are bad. And when they are gone so is he. There’s no telling if anyone will be able to replace his meme castle, but for now, at least we have his face as an emotion for the nation.
