Photo by Pooneh Ghana

I used to be a Drake fan. Not so much in the mixtape days—that stuff always seemed self-evidently embarrassing—but something clicked on Thank Me Later, and I was completely sold. I was 23, just a couple months younger than Aubrey himself, and sort of corny in the way that most 23 year olds are. I felt like Drake "got" me: constantly vacillating between unjustifiable cockiness and self-loathing, obsessed with ideas about success and intimacy that I hadn’t necessarily experienced firsthand but could almost taste. I had a Skrillex haircut, an enthusiastic Blogspot, and made minimum wage at a Chinese fast food chain that was only marginally better than Panda Express. I was in need of some direction, and it felt good to be a part of something in real time, surfing the swelling wave of this obvious juggernaut. And then there was Take Care: still a masterpiece, if a bit exhausting from start to finish. I took "Marvin’s Room" as gospel; let she without a shattered iPhone 4S full of 3AM "are you drunk right now?" texts cast the first stone. I got a "Take Care" tattoo after a particularly messy breakup, a Drake move if there ever was one. I gazed into the abyss of millennial cliche, and the abyss gazed back.

Something began to shift over the last year, starting around "0-100" and crystallizing on If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late—either that, or I just became woke enough (or jaded enough) to call bullshit on the whole enterprise. The old Drake was an easy target, a feather-stuffed Big Ghostface punching bag, a proto-emo Seth Cohen type who’s totally not like those other guys. The new Drake’s triceps are cut like the Canadian Rockies, and his omg-so-random Twitter mode has been swapped for tough-guy roadman slang. The Sauvignon Blanc’s been replaced by soda dirty like Diana. It’s a lot harder to drunk-dial your exes when you’re in the crib with the phoooone off. But it’s not really about "soft" versus "hard," and it never was. It’s about Drake seriously positioning himself as the best rapper alive, and finally getting away with it.

-=-=-=-The most extreme manifestation of Drizzy’s mission to be top dog is his recent beef with Meek Mill, semi-frequent collaborator and boyfriend of Drake’s YMCMB labelmate and long-running crush Nicki Minaj. As you’re well aware unless you’ve been hiding in a wifi-less cave the past two weeks (in which case, is it chill if I join you?), Meek struck the first blow with a series of salty tweets accusing Drake of employing a ghostwriter. These accusations have since been proven at least somewhat true—reference tracks by a relatively unknown Atlanta rapper named Quentin Miller have begun to surface, and you have to imagine OVO’s subsequent defensive distractions would indicate there’s more where they came from—though most of the #DrakeHive seems pretty nonplussed about it. The climax came Monday night, when Drake closed out OVO Fest performing his recent diss tracks in front of mammoth projections of supposedly scathing Meek memes, crowd-sourced from amateur Twitter comedians and slobbering corporations eager to grind the biggest rap beef of the 2010s into Triple Whataburgers®. Forget your Dada outfit Photoshops and Wheelchair Jimmy jokes of yesteryear: Drake deploys the memes ‘round here these days, he’ll have you know!

And he won, of course—as much as anyone can "win" this Olympic exhibition of doing too much. Meek biffed this one, hard; "Wanna Know" was bafflingly toothless, and though any claims of his career being finished are delusional, it’s likely this is how most casual rap fans will remember him 10 years from now. But watching Drake frolic in front of Meek and Nicki memes in an Evil Knievel suit Monday night didn’t feel triumphant at all. Mind you, this is the guy who, in 2011, said the thing he feared most about his generation was the popularity of Tumblr: "Instead of kids going out and making their own moments, they’re just taking these images and living vicariously through other people’s moments." The same guy who declared, "Fuck going online, that ain’t part of my day" on "Energy" earlier this year. "Twitter isn’t real," he scoffed when I attended his CRWN interview with Elliott Wilson in 2013. "That’s a terrible medium to exist in." Frankly, he wasn’t wrong.