Photo: Simone Joyner/Getty Images

In August 2024, a few months after the release of Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us,” Drake tried to distract the public from his humiliation by data-dumping 100 gigabytes of content onto the internet. Included in the drop was a new EP, footage of conversations with other celebrities, and videos capturing the recording sessions of beloved songs, but to find the compelling gems tucked away in this labyrinthian volume required fans to spend hours upon hours sorting through it. The goal wasn’t to shape or combat any one particular narrative, but to complicate the entire story through brute force. If Drake couldn’t get people to believe he’d won his beef with Kendrick, maybe he could at least feed them so much content they were no longer sure how they felt about him. It didn’t work. The dump came far too soon after “Not Like Us” for full curiosity in Drake’s output to be restored; Kendrick spent a full year taking victory laps on this song in the form of his Super Bowl performance and grammy wins. But it hinted at the marketing playbook Drake would pull from going forward. It was Drake’s first real attempt at flooding the zone.

“Flooding the zone” is a contemporary mode of propaganda often attributed to the thinking of MAGA political strategist Steve Bannon, which operates based on the belief that controlling the public in the digital age isn’t about feeding them favorable messaging, but rather dominating cycle after news cycle by introducing so much dubious and misguided messaging that they no longer know what to focus on or how to think. If Drake’s first attempt at this was a failure, he’s clearly had extra time to see the Trump administration employ the tactic to great effect, because on May 15, the artist deployed it more successfully when he released three albums on the same day, the long-awaited Iceman, plus the surprise releases Habibti and Maid of Honour. 

For context on just how much Drake material this is, the three albums comprise 43 new songs and a combined runtime of almost two and a half hours. But that’s not the extent of the new Drake content. The album premiered during the fourth episode of Drake’s “Iceman” livestream series on YouTube. It was accompanied by 14 new music videos, one of which (“Dust”) includes a headline-generating cameo from semi-controversial comedian Shane Gillis. And this is to say nothing of the album’s rollout, which involved Drake hiding the Iceman release date in a big block of ice in his hometown of Toronto, creating a public frenzy in the process.

If the goal was simply to make himself the main character again, Drake’s strategy worked. Since tracks from Iceman began leaking piece meal on May 14, people online have been discussing them endlessly, and quoting individual lines where the rapper takes shots at adversaries like Lamar, Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky, LeBron James, and J. Cole. This, in turn, has created curiosity, which will inevitably drive up streaming numbers. But where does one start when it comes to actually evaluating the creative merit of these three projects?

Ideally, Drake would have used these albums to prove that he’s still relevant and undeniable enough to make a chart-topping hit, regardless of whether he’s a punch line. But whether he succeeded will continue to be debated. On Maid of Honour and Habibti, he leans into sounds he previously found success with, like the dance-vibes of Honestly, Nevermind and the R&B-warbling of More Life, evoking memories of when he did have this power. No matter that the melodies are less sticky this time around, or that the crooning is more grating. There are enough undeniable moments across these albums’ 25 songs, like the house outro of the Sexy Redd-featuring “Cheetah Print,” for fans to gravitate to.

Likewise, traditional logic would have said it’s incumbent on Drake to respond to all his high-profile critics to reestablish his rap bona fides, but by virtue of flooding the zone, his responses don’t need to be unimpeachable. On “Make Them Remember,” he raps that LeBron James made his “career off switching teams up,” a thin critique given Drake has faced similar criticisms for hopping between regional sounds. Does it matter, or is it even true, that “100 million streams” of Kendrick Lamar’s vanished, as Drake claims on “Make them Pay?” Unclear. For all his talk on the album about how he won’t forget about people who refused to take sides during his Kendrick beef, the album features his friend 21 Savage, a person who refused to take sides  during the Kendrick beef. Individually, each of these inconsistencies matter. Over the course of the album, none of them do. The average listener isn’t going to spend their time scrutinizing all these claims, nor would it be entertaining for them to do so. At a certain point, it all becomes noise.

On Friday morning, the official X account of the White House took to the platform to post an edited picture of Drake’s Iceman album cover. Where the official version features a diamond-encrusted silver glove, a la Michael Jackson, the White House’s version shows that glove holding up a similarly glittery MAGA chain. It’s an illogical choice, given the album is not politically oriented in any way. Drake is not an avowed Republican, nor does he, as a Canadian, have an interest in Making America Great Again. It doesn’t matter. The post got people talking. It distracted people temporarily from whatever horrors the administration is currently committing. It’s what happens when you put out so much content that nothing means anything.

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