With the release of his first solo single in 2023, Drake has officially, probably rekindled the beef between himself and Kanye West…if you could ever say the flame went out. On “Search & Rescue,” Drake uses an excerpt of a conversation between Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner about the former’s divorce from West.
“I didn’t come this far, just to come this far and not be happy,” Kardashian tells her mother in a clip from an episode of their reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
The single cover art also appears to feature Drake and a woman who, if not Kardashian, certainly bears an intentional resemblance to her, clad in black helmets, another pretty clear indication of trolling. (For whatever it’s worth, Drake’s father, Dennis Graham, said on social media that his son “is not trolling anyone, it’s just a song.”) For the record, one bizarre aspect of the two rapper’s longstanding beef has been the implication that Drake slept with Kim Kardashian—during her marriage to West—a theory that’s been traced back to lyrics on several different verses from “Sicko Mode” to “Talk Up,” and which West himself even addressed once on Drink Champs.
This all comes after Drake removed any notion that things were cool between the two on a cut from his album Her Loss (with 21 Savage). The Daft Punk-sampling “Circo Loco” saw Drake going scorched earth with lyrics widely interpreted as disrespecting Megan Thee Stallion, and a choice Kanye comment: “Linking with the opps, bitch, I did that shit for J. Prince,” he raps, a pretty undeniable reference to the famed detente meeting between the two rap stars and hip-hop power player J. Prince in December 2021. Following that meeting, Drake and Kanye performed together at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as part of a concert aimed at raising awareness of activist efforts to free ex-gang leader Larry Hoover from a life sentence.
In a since-deleted tweet Kanye reacted to “Circo Loco” writing, “Enough already I done gave this man his flowers multiple times. Let’s really see who [our] real opps are in this music game. Imagine all the rappers on the same side and everyone cleaning up each other’s contracts. It’s kingdom time. Love Drake.”
West has not spoken much publicly about Drake in the last year, though he’s been embroiled in much graver controversies related to his praise of Adolf Hitler and Nazis, accusations of anti-semitism, and support of white nationalist figures like Nick Fuentes.
The bad blood between the two hip-hop superstars goes back over ten years and involves a slew of ancillary figures. Its recent iteration dates back to fight in 2018, when Drake was briefly invited to Kanye’s Wyoming sessions for the album that would become Ye, but instead of leaving with a collaboration—Drake later revealed he loved the “Lift Yourself” beat, which Kanye would later keep for himself just to scat poop bars over it—Pusha T picked at the old scab of Drake’s ghostwriting allegations on the Kanye-produced “Infrared,” prompting Drake to return fire with “Duppy Freestyle,” where he bragged about writing for West on The Life of Pablo. “I’ve done things for him I thought that he never would need/Father had to stretch his hands out and get it from me,” he says.
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).
West posted a picture of Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker, and wrote, “I live for this. I’ve been fucked with by nerd ass jock n***as like you my whole life. You will never recover. I promise you.”
A few days later, on August 23, West appeared to truly go “Joker mode” by sharing what seemed to be Drake’s Toronto address in an Instagram post he eventually deleted. The Canadian rapper downplayed the leak by posting a video of himself chuckling on Instagram later that night, and would address the matter directly on CLB’s “7AM on Bridle Path” (which is his address).
There were rumors that the pair would release their albums on the same Friday, but West’s DONDA came a few days prior to Drake’s Certified Lover Boy. Drake won the first week sales battle, though following his album release, West tied Drake by having 23 songs appear on the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously.
Following the Free Larry Hoover concert though, things seemed to be copacetic—Drake was even spotted attending an early private listening for Donda 2. But as his recent lyrics and antics (plus shots at Pusha on Her Loss) prove, this is a Cold War that will likely never end at this point.