Drake 'jacked my beat' for Hotline Bling, says D.R.A.M.

Drake says he was trying to recreate the reggae dancehall of many artists making a song based on one riddim

 

Drake … Fascinating riddim. Photograph: Ollie Millington/Redferns via Getty Images

Over the summer, it was accusations that he used ghostwriters for his raps that bedevilled Drake. Now it’s the claim that his latest hit, Hotline Bling, has taken its beat from another song.

D.R.A.M. performed in Drake’s home city of Toronto on Monday night and took the opportunity to note on Twitter that the experience had been “bittersweet”. Sweet, he said, because he was sharing his music; bitter because “after my performance, all I’m seeing is Cha Cha/Hotline Bling comparisons on my timeline”.

“Yeah, I feel I got jacked for my record,” he said. “But I’m GOOD.”

Drake himself has acknowledged the similarity between Hotline Bling and Cha Cha, but has said it’s just because he’s trying to do what reggae and dancehall artists have long done, and take the backing track from one song to create something new. The Fader dug out an unused quote from its recent interview with him in which he made that point.

“You know, like in Jamaica, you’ll have a riddim and it’s like, everyone has to do a song on that,” he said. “Imagine that in rap, or imagine that in R&B. Imagine if we got one beat and every single person – me, this guy, this guy, all these guys – had to do a song on that one beat. So sometimes I’ll pick a beat that’s a bit, like, sunnier, I guess is the word you used, than usual, and I just try my hand at it. And that’s kind of what Hotline Bling was. And I loved it. It’s cool. I’ve been excited by that sort of creative process.”

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Meek Mill was too late to hurt Drake with his diss track

By the time Meek Mill released Wanna Know, his comeback to diss tracks from Drake, he was already the punchline of too many internet memes

 

Unscathed … Meek swings for Drake, and misses. Photograph: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for BET

What a rough week it’s been for Meek Mill. Before you scroll down to type out “who?” in the comment box, let me explain. He’s a Philadelphia rapper who’s recently been known first for dating Nicki Minaj and then for starting a Twitter beef with Drake – and it didn’t end well for Meek.

In fact, you could say the whole thing blew up spectacularly in his face. Meek’s been memed to within an inch of his life and mocked on just about every social network since he accused Drake of using lyrical ghostwriters. He then swiftly became the subject of two diss tracks shared four days apart.

The first, Charged Up, came out on Saturday 25 July. Meek deemed it “baby lotion soft” on Twitter, and honestly just should have left it there. By the timeDrake returned with Back to Back Freestyle, on Wednesday 29 July, it felt as though anyone who hadn’t followed Meek’s career up to that point was never going to bother. His fans could only watch on helplessly as their favourite was relentlessly trashed by one of rap’s biggest current crossover stars.

Really, to think that this started because Meek was unhappy that Drake didn’t tweet support for his recent album, Dreams Worth More than Money, makes the whole fiasco even more ridiculous. It’s petty. Meek should’ve just hit “save tweet as draft”, slept on it, and let the whole thing go.

Because now that he’s finally responded in kind, with a diss track of his own –Wanna Know – the response hasn’t been great. Truth be told, Meek had a brief window of time in which to share his rebuttal, and it definitely fell somewhere between Sunday and Tuesday. That Drake hit him with a one-two punch of two consecutive disses – written in two different styles, for the hell of it – and gave watching fans too much fodder for jokes at Meek’s expense.

Regardless of Wanna Know’s quality, the winner of this delicately passive-aggressive beef was already decided by the time Toronto city Councillor Norm Kelly had waded in on Twitter, posting a photo inspired by one of Drake’s Back to Back lyrics. Meek had lost when Drake fans swarmed Meek’s Instagram account on Sunday, posting plug, battery and arrow emojis in the comments below his pictures in homage to Drake’s Charged Up.

Likewise, Meek had lost when people started editing videos that made fun of his silence. Would you like to imagine Meek as the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, bullied by an imagined Drake posse? Now you can watch that. Or how about an edit of what Meek’s distressed reaction might have been when he first heard Back to Back? The internet has you sorted.

Meek had truly lost when news of the beef spread trended on Twitter in the UK for most of Wednesday morning, and made so much of an impact on the internet’s echo chamber that burger joints were saying their piece, too. Things really are dire when Burger King’s social media manager thinks: “Hmm, how can we turn this rapper’s public pummelling into a Twitter punchline that facilitates the sale of our product?”

In a genre where authenticity has always been king, Meek attempted to throw a hefty jab at Drake – and missed. He’s been paying the price ever since. Wanna Know isn’t entirely awful, bouncing over a Swizz Beats-produced beat and dropping in punchlines about Milli Vanilli and 50 Cent’s past beef with Ja Rule (to which Ja Rule replied on Instagram, making it clear he wasn’t impressed with the track as a whole). Meek was never going to come out on top, though, because he needlessly started an internet fight that could have been settled in private. Drake responded firmly, essentially saying, “don’t come for me unless I send for you”.

As social media brings musicians closer to their fans and further from the safe confines of statements checked and released by a team of managers and publicists, people like Meek learn the lesson that unchecked openness can easily backfire. Azealia Banks and Taylor Swift have felt that pain before him. And Drake? He’s having the last laugh.

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