13 Takeaways From Drake’s Hard-Drive Dump

This spring, after Kendrick Lamar surfaced the long-subterranean ill will between himself and Drake on “Like That,” Drake responded with “Push Ups,” its title a clever play about Kendrick’s allegedly unfavorable deal with his original label, Top Dawg Entertainment. Only “Push Ups” wasn’t immediately issued to digital-streaming platforms or pushed out on Drake’s social-media channels — it was left to live as an unconfirmed leak, leaving the song dogged by speculation as to whether or not it was created with AI. A cynical observer can only assume that if the reaction to “Push Ups” had not been so positive, it would have been made to drift into the ether.

The 100-gigabyte dump of music, videos, and photos that Drake released yesterday — months after becoming the most unambiguous loser of a major rap beef in the genre’s history — similarly attempts to have it both ways: spontaneous but carefully considered, in line with the seemingly off-the-cuff 4 a.m. releases of songs that soon reveal themselves to be well-oiled album rollouts. The most generous reading is that this flood from a .org domain harkens back to the blog era of the late 2000s and early 2010s, when Drake’s career nudged toward terminal velocity thanks to posts on Nah Right and 2DopeBoyz.

But the point is not to center new music, no matter how much Drake might hope “Housekeeping Knows ” — one of three new songs available in the archive — pops at radio. Rather, this haphazard array of clips, photos, and the types of PDFs a Bond villain would commission scan as an attempt to reaffirm him as an auteur. Nothing here will drown out “Not Like Us”; what could? What does follow are the most notable takeaways from a purposefully unnavigable bit of image management. You can check out the full archive here.

He’s still clinging to Atlanta.

When the Kendrick-Drake beef blew open, it was reasonable to predict that other rappers would fall on one side or the other, publicly defending whoever they were personally closest to or felt was more inclined to help their career. But virtually no one showed up to back Drake, including the Atlanta rappers whose style he has co-opted and who were singled out by Kendrick in “Not Like Us,” where he goes so far as to call Drake a colonizer. So it’s conspicuous he enlists 21 Savage and Young Thug, two Atlantans, on new song “It’s Up” for a bludgeoning but not particularly memorable trap test balloon.

He was sending reference tracks to Kanye during the Pusha T beef.

Footage of Drake rapping the hook to Kanye West’s “Yikes” is not exactly a bombshell. For all the handwringing (and outright disdain) that West has invited in the past decade, there are surprisingly few allegations of stolen credit (he has writers, not ghostwriters) and Drake’s name has always appeared in the liner notes for the song from ye. But its inclusion here, like every decision made about this nominally messy but surely painfully coiffed data dump, is pointed: I wrote this for you, and you dropped it a week after Pusha put out “The Story of Adidon.” At a moment when Drake appears to have lost control over the labyrinthine social dynamics of rap’s A-list, this seems to be an attempt to reestablish supremacy.

He’s going to keep ingesting new trends.

The Latto-featuring (hey! Another Atlantan) “Housekeeping Knows” is a remarkably clean distillation of where Drake could be — and perhaps should be — going with his pop singles. “Housekeeping” swipes the pace and breathlessness of the club-rap scenes bubbling on the East Coast, pairing its pounding drums with delicate vocals in the kind of signature Drake synthesis that could stick to the back half of the summer.

He’s been filming himself.

It’s funny Drake included some fan-shot videos of OVO Fest performances in the mix, because these folders also reveal that Drake has had his own personal cameras trained on himself for years. The data dump features nearly six hours of him conceiving and finishing eventual Billboard hits, running through versions of his stage show, and … explaining to his mother that Serena Williams will recognize herself in his verses but not be too mad about it. It recalls the Kanye West film jeen-yuhs and the spate of Beyoncé archival footage (and invites questions about whether he’s doing it precisely because they’re doing it). It’s not exactly documentary, but something a little more uncanny: a permanent state of being on.

He loves his airplane.

Included within are various concept decks for “Air Drake II,” which could have been “an all-chrome Boeing 757. Mirrored, polished. Chrome as a logo, as a graphic unto itself.” It’s the sort of thing you might have drawn on your desk in middle school and/or allegedly sold to a Serbian oil heir to cover gambling debts.

He and 40 rearranged their schedules to snag a last-minute Jay-Z verse

Never-before-seen footage shows Drake trying to game out, down to the hour, when exactly Hov could get him a guest spot for “Talk Up” off from Scorpion, plotting the times of naps and open windows to give quick text responses to the God MC.

He got Cam’ron’s blessing to wear his iconic pink fur.

And joked with the Harlem legend that it made him feel like he hated Jay-Z.

He’s also got thoughts on tour designs.

… which include notes about giant “holographic girls.”

He continues to orbit Pluto.

In “Family Matters,” Drake’s seven-and-a-half-minute diss song from May, his focus drifts from Kendrick Lamar to Rick Ross (whom he accused of [squints] living far away), the Weeknd, and A$AP Rocky. But Drake’s mentions of Future — who joined the Toronto rapper on 2015’s What a Time to Be Alive before, confusingly, seeming to disown it — are curiously limp. “Pluto shit make me sick to my stomach / We ain’t never really been through it” is a bizarrely noncommittal reply to a former collaborator who put out two albums in two months that were conceived at least in part as rebukes to Drake’s dominance. New clips from the archive show Drake mulling a Future appearance on 2016’s megahit “Hotline Bling” They seem like an attempt to reaffirm Drake as a kingmaker, giveth-ing and taketh-ing away chances at entering the pop stratosphere.

He almost went with this for the Her Loss cover.

In an alternate universe, we got a cursed piece of watercolor motel art instead of a closeup portrait of Suki Baby.

He should return to the Honestly, Nevermind universe.

Sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep at night and I hear something knocked over in the alley below my building, or sense a helicopter in the sky above it, I wonder if my fellow Canadians have finally come to throw me in a black site for my assertion that Honestly, Nevermind, Drake’s surprise-drop dance LP from 2022, is his only truly great album. When that day comes, I’ll ask if they can play the third of three new songs, “Blue Green Red,” on the chopper flight.

He took more than a dozen videos of a storm in Miami for some reason.

Maybe he was on a Michael Mann kick.

He still sees pop dominance as the path to immortality

Do you remember how, toward the end of Entourage, Vince goes around interviewing every ex-fling he can find for a documentary about how he’s not really that bad of a guy? Tucked into a folder of videos that show a pensive 40 playing piano is an 11-minute clip where he riffs on Drake’s position in the pantheon of great artists, suggesting that he’s already surpassed Michael Jackson and is on a plane with the likes of Stevie Wonder. It’s fair to assume that 40 — the architect of the submerged-but-crystalline, post–808s & Heartbreak sound that helped launch Drake’s career — thinks this highly of his close friend’s work on a strictly musical level. But the language he uses to underline Drake’s success is the language of corporate dominance and inertia. And in that way, he’s right: Drake is a machine designed to perpetuate itself, and it does so beautifully.