Drake’s Pettiness Has Reached New Heights

The music industry’s petty poet, Drake, kicked off his It’s All a Blur tour Wednesday night in Chicago with a genuinely dazzling spectacle of stagecraft, including a statue of the late designer Virgil Abloh, a hologram projection of Drizzy handing him his newly released book of poetry, and a set list jam-packed with enough hits to turn even the biggest Drake hater into a certified lover boy. The tour marks Drake’s first string of shows since his tour with Migos in 2018, which might explain a particularly curious diss baked within his set.

Fan video from the show captured a brief interlude in which Drake took aim at Childish Gambino’s 2018 hit “This Is America.” The song, Gambino’s only Number One record, which garnered him the Song of the Year Grammy in 2019, was apparently supposed to be a Drake diss. Gambino, a.k.a. Donald Glover, told GQ earlier this year that the track originated as a jab at The Boy. In explaining the song’s origins, Glover told the interviewer that “it started as a Drake diss to be honest,” before adding, “as, like, a funny way of doing it.” The admission struck a nerve with Drizzy, whose set design during his opening-night performance included a text scroll on the stadium’s screens that called Gambino’s track “overrated and over awarded.”

Now, a few things about the fracas stand out. First is the fact that Drake consumes enough media about himself to be seemingly aware of a half-joking diss in a video clip on GQ’s YouTube channel (one has to wonder if he’s read any other publication’s commentary on him, perhaps on which tech company he should buy). Second, and more important, is the fact that he chose to air this grievance on the first night of his tour. Here is one of the biggest stars on the planet, on the cusp of releasing yet another album, on tour for the first time in five years, publicly venting over a joke made by a comedian turned rapper.

Copies of Drake’s poetry book, Titles Ruin Everything, started arriving this week featuring one-page treatises like “I’m not four you … really starting to put two and two together” that reveal an interior mind of a truly petty king. His Gambino diss cements his place on the throne. The Six God is indeed watching, and you never know when he’ll strike.

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