"Hotline Bling" is the Drake singularity, the moment where he becomes self-aware and he wields his infamy like a weapon. Even the song's rise to fame mirrors the kind of "Started From the Bottom" myth Drake loves—it dropped unceremoniously with minimal promotion and gradually became inescapable. And why not? "Hotline Bling" took the wispy stale air of sad-drunk, "Marvins Room" Drake and suffused it with warm, tropical colors. It’s the perfect thing to soundtrack the end of summer when the sky gets a little pinker and your summer flings come to an end.

That "Hotline Bling" found such immense popularity illustrated an arguable skill of Drake's to pluck songs from their regional hit purgatory and put his own stamp on them, with the original performer usually left to languish in Drake's shadow. "Hotline Bling" is essentially a reworking of D.R.A.M.'s "Cha Cha", which is in turn a reworking of Timmy Thomas' ’70s hit "Why Can't We Live Together"; by autumn, the song slipped out of Drake's control entirely, becoming fodder for jokes, wedding DJ sets, and gimmicky covers and interpretations. Erykah Badu reinvented it with a version almost as good as the original, while Justin Bieber pulled a stunt that required fans to call an actual hotline to hear Bieber croon the song into their earpiece. It wasn't Drake's song anymore—it was everyone's.

In typically calculating fashion, Drake absorbed all that attention and then spun it back on the public. Dropping a music video—a vision of Drake pulling awkward shapes against pastel-colored James Turrell walls, purportedly designed to encourage fans to make their own memes and jokes—almost five months after the song first debuted made it an event all over again. Because if there's anything Drake knows, it's that people can't be laughing at you if you're laughing with them.

That idea is core to "Hotline Bling." That one of the softest Drake tunes ever dominated airwaves in the wake of the Meek Mill beef was the best revenge he could hope for—the words "you gettin' bodied by a singin' nigga" from "Back to Back" became a self-fulfilling prophecy. As huge as its success was, "Hotline Bling" still never gave Drake that coveted #1 spot; he was held at bay first by his fellow Canadian the Weeknd, and then by Adele (or maybe it was the fault of his own business decisions). Whatever it was, it hardly mattered, because at that point, "Hotline Bling" was barely a song at all anymore. It was one big goofy, self-aware cultural force. And there's nothing that sums up Drake—as shrewd, manipulative, and lovable as he was in 2015—better than that. —Andrew Ryce

Drake: "Hotline Bling"