We all know what happened next. On “The Story of Adidon,” Pusha blasted Drake for keeping the identity of his son hidden, and planning to use him as part of a rumored Adidas campaign. According to J Prince, Drake had an atomic diss track that would have “ended [Pusha’s] career” and also done major damage to West, but he decided to shelve it.
Tempers cooled some throughout 2018, with occasional flare-ups through West’s Twitter and his appearance on David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, where West referred to Drake as “an artist which I will not mention because I’m not allowed to mention him or any of his family members.”
That peace didn’t last very long. DONDA contained bars on two different songs that could be taken as subliminal shots Drake. On “Pure Souls” West raps, “I can give a dollar to every person on Earth/Man, it’s gotta be God’s plan/Man I swear these boys keep playin/We gon have to square up then.” (In the “God’s Plan” video, Drake gave away $1 million to unsuspecting strangers.) And most notably, on “Junya,” West warns, “Move out of the way of my release/Tryna get me off my Qs and Ps/Why can’t losers never lose in peace?/Ain’t nobody ’round me losing sleep.” One week later, Drake countered saying his album was on the horizon, and seemed to threaten “anyone in the way,” potentially including West.
From there, entourage members on both sides started chirping at each other on social media, as sure a sign as any that shit was getting real. Longtime Kanye confidant Don C took a jab at Drake’s new Nike sneaker on IG, prompting Drake’s loyal muscle Chubbs to reply, “See us outside.” (Drake, cryptically, also jumped into the fray with laughing and blind man emojis.) Rick Ross, who has worked with both artists, said “I love it” of the beef in an appearance on SiriusXM’s The Mike Muse Show, and added that Drake shared a cryptic text with him.
“He said, ‘Everything is unfolding. I’m about to be as free as a bird.’ And he put the caption with the owl,” Ross says. “And I just, I couldn’t do nothing but put ‘Hahahaha’ because to me, I understand the genius to both of these artists, and I understand this is nothing personal to them. This is two levels of creativity inspiring each other.”
Drake then brought the conversation back to wax (and mentioned West by name) in a verse on Trippie Redd’s “Betrayal,” released on August 20. “All these fools I’m beefin’ that I barely know/Forty-five, forty-four, let it go/Ye ain’t changin’ shit for me, it’s set in stone,” he says, alluding West and Pusha-T’s ages, as well as the incessant speculation over release dates. Kanye collaborator Consequence responded specifically to these bars on Twitter, writing “Fuck a Betrayal. It’s the Disrespect for me dawg.”
Then, as they so often do, things got nuclear in the group chat. On August 21, West briefly shared a screenshot of his phone on Instagram, specifically a nine member group text that featured Pusha-T and people by the initials J, M, B, V, F, B, T—and, most importantly, D (thought widely to be Drake himself).
Grant Rindner
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