Drake and Meek Mill Feud

work in progress

Background

On July 21st, 2015, Meek Mill, who has more than 4.92 million followers on Twitter, tweeted that hip hop contemporary Drake did not write his own raps. While ghostwriters and collaborators are common in hip hop, to say that someone does not write their own raps is the equivalent of saying that they are not very good at rapping. The post received over 135,000 retweets and over 107,000 favorites by July 30th, 2015.^[1]

Meek went on to tweet several more allusions to Drake not writing his own songs that night, including a tweet that contained only the name “Quentin Miller,” a man with writing credits on several Drake songs. Drake didn’t respond directly to the tweets, however he was active on Instagram, liking a post by a user who covered a magazine with Meek Mill’s face on it with another magazine that featured Skepta, one of Drake’s friends, and telling another user in a private message that he “signed up for greatness. This comes with it.”^[2]

Notable Developments

Funkmaster Flex Plays Quentin Miller Recording

The following day, the New York City radio station Hot 97 DJ, Funkmaster Flex, played a recording sung by Quentin Miller as a reference track for the Drake song “10 Bands.” The track was clearly the basis for the final song.^[3]

Two days later, Miller responded in a post on Tumblr, saying that he had worked on the track briefly and that he had seen Drake write the songs himself, in front of him. The post received 3,008 notes.^[3]

Drake’s Responses

On July 26th, 2015, Drake responded publicly to the allegations for the first time by releasing a song called “Charged Up” through his label, October’s Very Own, and through his deal with Apple’s Beats One radio service.

As of July 30th, 2015 the song had received more than 1 million plays on Soundcloud, and many more through YouTube uploads and the Beats 1 service. The song featured many specific jabs at Meek Mill, including references to relationships that Meek’s current girlfriend, Nicki Minaj, may or may not have had with Drake before she and Meek began dating.

“Rumor has it, there’s something that only I know/ Rumor has it, I steer this shit with my eyes closed/ Rumor has it, I either f--ked her or I never could/ But rumor has it, hasn’t done you n---as any good.”

On July 29th, 2015, Drake released a second dis track, entitled “Back to Back Freestyle”, featuring an image of Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays celebrating after hitting a game-winning home run in the 1993 World Series against the Philadephia Phillies. This referred to the hometowns of Drake (Toronto) and Meek Mill (Philadelphia), and also how Drake was intending to finish the argument with the track. In addition, the addition of the word “freestyle” onto the end of the track’s title specifically indicated that Drake had not only written these lyrics, but come up with them off of the top of his head.^[4]

This track featured even more insults for Meek Mill, including the lyric “Trigger fingers turn to Twitter fingers,” and a reference to Nicki Minaj’s “Pinkprint” Tour, on which Meek was accompanying Minaj, with “You love her, then you gotta give the world to her/ Is that a world tour or your girl’s tour?”

Meek’s Response

Meek Mill was rumored to also be releasing a dis track, including in a tweet that appeared to have a snippet (below) however none ever materialized.^[2]

After Funkmaster Flex spent several hours hyping the track’s arrival on his radio show, and then never played it, a Change.org petition was created to get him fired from the station. As of July 30th, the petition was only 355 signatures away from its goal of 10,000.^[6]

In addition, Meek Mill tweeted several responses to Drake’s raps, some of which have been interpreted as half-apologies.

Online Response

Various aspects of the Drake and Meek Mill feud trended worldwide on almost every social network and gained news coverage from sources as varied as The New York Times and TMZ.^[5][11] Users created images that were spread widely via Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter, especially though the subculture known as Black Twitter. In the subreddit devoted to that subculture, /r/blackpeopletwitter, where the feud was referred to as “Rap Civil War” in flare, over 50 posts related to the feud have thousands of upvotes.^[7] Over 20,000 posts on Instagram are tagged with the hashtags #drakevsmeekmill and #drakevsmeek and another 30,000 posts were made on Twitter with the latter hashtag.^[8][9]

A selection of feud-related reaction images and memes

Toronto City Councillor Norm Kelly’s Reaction

While many different celebrities reacted to the feud, one of the most widely noticed was the reaction of Toronto City Councillor Norm Kelly, who started his own feud with Meek regarding his comments. The morning after Meek Mill made his initial comments regarding Drake, the Councillor tweeted that Meek was no longer welcome in Toronto after dissing the local hero. This initial tweet earned @Norm, as he is known on Twitter, over 133,000 retweets.^[10] The conversation continued:

After his defense of Drake, Norm Kelly began appearing in exploitables, tweets, and Instagram-style memes about the feud. He has continued to support Drake, tweeting about the song releases and other media related to the feud.

Search Interest

External References