Making fun of Drake used to be extremely common. He was the kind of artist to wear his heart on his sleeve. Being emotional wasn’t something to feel ashamed of in his eyes. But that didn’t stop people from ruthlessly making fun of the Toronto MC. They made countless memes of him, called him every version of soft you could imagine. It wasn’t until Drake’s feud with Meek Mill that he would receive a sense of legitimacy from rap fans.
After a while, those same memes started to slow down. But the memes were also a big driving force to his popularity. So what do you do? Make your own. On this day 11 years ago, Drake released “Hotline Bling”, the catchy record that curbed a lot from the addictive groove of “Cha Cha” by DRAM.
But it was his silly dance moves that immediately grabbed people. People made dozens of GIFs and memes teasing him. But rather than being the butt of jokes, it’s immediately clear that the Canadian rapper is actually in on the joke this time. Instead of people making fun of him being an emotional R&B singer wanting rapper cred, they could put him next to Mr. Bean. Scientists wanted to use him as a reference for robots to learn dancing.
Drake Played up the Memes With ‘Hotline Bling’ on This Day 11 Years Ago
Memes and all, critics loved “Hotline Bling”. Pitchfork named it Best New Music at the time of release, comparing it to “Roxanne” by The Police in the process. “A Twitter search of the song generates an ever-growing tail of celebratory Vines, chorus quotes. It is, by any standard, already a massive hit, thus proving once more that Drake’s SoundCloud is swifter, more merciless, and decisive than any single diss song,” Jayson Greene wrote.
Similarly, publications rated it highly on their year-end lists. Billboard heralded the record as the second-best song of 2015. Still, that doesn’t mean Drake was without his fair share of critics. In a lengthy op-ed tackling Drake’s growing hyper-masculine persona, writer Meaghan Garvey admitted that “Hotline Bling” was catchy. However, the core of the lyrics sees a deeply entitled, insecure man who bordered into “sl*t-shame” territory.
“That’s the thing about charged-up ‘nice guys,’ though: their manipulative strategy is surprisingly effective, because you don’t want to see it coming,” Garvey wrote. “I’ve fallen for enough scheming, overcompensating nerds who’ve used hoarded knowledge and projected empathy to distract from their terrible personalities to say this with authority.”
(Photo by Andrew Chin/Getty Images)
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