Drake and His Fans vs the World
The chart-topping album Iceman has broken records—and done little to quell ongoing criticisms of the artist. Where does that leave his fandom?
For nearly two decades, Drake has stood among hip-hop’s elite. He’s dominated the Billboard charts, made a sweep at major award shows, and stood firm whenever his artistry has been tested. By the late 2010s, he was among the biggest musical acts in the world. But the pressure Drake faced in the lead-up to his May 15th album, Iceman, and his two surprise projects, Habibti and Maid of Honour, has been unlike anything he and his fanbase have ever experienced.
It’s been two years since Drake’s feud with fellow rap star Kendrick Lamar evolved into a massive cultural war. Across 2024’s “Euphoria,” “Meet the Grahams," and chart-topper “Not Like Us,” Lamar took aim at Drake’s entire persona, framing him as an inauthentic cultural appropriator who weaponized Blackness and used his many collabs to access spaces he’d never otherwise earn his way into. It didn’t hurt that “Not Like Us” was also a bop, becoming a “song of the summer,” spawning club singalongs across the country, and garnering whole crowds losing it over Kendrick’s repeated allegation that Drake has a history of inappropriate relationships with underage girls.
Beyond the memes and social media side-taking, the battle placed a real dividing line between the two artists’ fanbases, and an even larger one within the hip-hop community. In the eyes of Kendrick stans, his critique of Drake was damning, even career-obliterating. Drake’s fans believed Kendrick’s lyrical jabs were filled with baseless accusations and desperate attempts to dethrone one of rap’s biggest stars. While Kendrick swept the 2025 Grammys (the producers cut the crowd singalong) and brought “Not Like Us” to the widest and most mainstream of audiences at the Super Bowl halftime show, core Drake fans remained stout in their support of the rapper. But they also understood the magnitude of the moment.
“When Drake lost that battle, people started looking at him funny,” long-time Drake fan Steve Desmarathes, one of several Drake fans I tracked down while attending Philadelphia’s annual Roots Picnic, told me. The reputational damage Kendrick had dealt meant Drake couldn’t simply put out a singular hit: he needed a quality album that would prove his supporters right, and silence the detractors who claimed his career was on its last legs—“something to remind people how great he is,” Desmarathes said.
