We Have to Say It: Drake Fell Off This Year

This page has a long history with Drake. We have defended him in the comments. We have defended him in the replies. We have defended him in group chats we were not invited to. If there was a hill, we died on it, came back and died on it again.

So understand what it costs us to type this sentence: Drake fell off this year.

Not in the numbers. The numbers are fine. The numbers are always fine. He fell off in the only place that matters in rap, which is the story. And the story is the thing he spent fifteen years building.

The lore

Remember how good it was. A kid from a teen drama on Canadian TV puts out a mixtape in 2009 and the whole industry changes shape around him. So Far Gone. Take Care. Nothing Was the Same. The owl. The 6. "Started From the Bottom" coming from a guy who, by his own lyrics, started somewhere around the middle. Nobody cared. That was the magic. He made the softest parts of rap feel like the main event.

Then came the run. If You're Reading This It's Too Late dropped with no warning and ate the year. "Hotline Bling" became a meme, a dance and a Halloween costume. Views. Scorpion. "God's Plan." He was on every playlist, every club, every wedding, every graduation. For about a decade, the biggest song in the world was either his or about to have a Drake verse on it.

The glam

And he lived it out loud. The private jet. The mansion in Toronto with the basketball court. The courtside seats. The chains. The Raptors ambassador role. He wasn't just a rapper, he was the whole aesthetic: rich, sad and texting you at 3 a.m. Every move came with a rollout and every rollout came with a feed full of clips telling you it was historic.

That feed, it turns out, was part of the product. Variety has named Drake among the artists using "clipping," where networks of editors get paid to flood social media with short clips until a moment looks like a movement. The casino streams, the Stake bets, the giveaways. Nothing wrong with marketing. But when the hype is bought, it stops being proof of anything.

The bills

Here is the thing about building a legend on authorship: the receipts never go away. In 2015 Meek Mill said Drake didn't write his own raps, and Funkmaster Flex played Quentin Miller's reference tracks on Hot 97. To be fair, Quentin Miller is credited on those songs, and pop stars cut reference tracks every day. But rap doesn't sell songs. It sells the pen. Over the years, more alleged references kept surfacing in other people's voices.

Then 2024 happened. He picked a fight with Kendrick Lamar and lost it in front of the entire planet. "Not Like Us" took over every party in America. In February 2025 it won Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and a week later a whole stadium sang it at the Super Bowl. Drake's answer was to sue his own record label over the song. A federal judge threw the case out. When your comeback plan is a lawsuit, the battle's over.

Janice

Which brings us to this year. "Janice STFU" broke Michael Jackson's record for the most No. 1s by a solo male artist. On paper, that's a coronation. In real life, a songwriter named Aviel Calev Hirschfield filed a lawsuit saying the chorus is "literally identical" to a demo he made and sent to producers in Drake's circle earlier in 2026. The suit names Drake, OVO and Universal and asks for a share of the profits.

Drake's side says he wrote the chorus himself. A lawsuit is one side's story, nothing has been proven, and a court gets the last word. We know. We read the fine print now. That's growth.

But think about what it means for the legend. The record-breaking song, the one that was supposed to end the argument, came with a court filing attached. The biggest night of his year turned into a credits dispute, and nobody's surprised. That's what falling off looks like at his level. The plaques keep coming. People just stopped believing the story on them.

Where that leaves us

Drake isn't going anywhere. He'll drop again, it'll go No. 1, and the clips will tell you it's historic. He has an ear for hooks, for collaborators and for packaging that maybe nobody of his generation can match. That's a real talent. It's just not the talent the GOAT debate was supposed to be measuring.

The lore was beautiful. The glam was fun. The run was undeniable. But every bad deal, every reference track and every bought-and-paid-for moment was a loan against the legend, and this year the bill came due all at once.

We loved this man. We defended this man. This page is officially done defending this man.

Please direct your hate to the replies. The page has no owner, so nobody will read them.

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