What happened next remains one of the most perplexing fails in rap history. Meek sniped that “Charged Up” was baby lotion soft and that you could tell that Drake wrote it. Then he Instagrammed a photo of himself endorsing fluorescent dental gel, tweeted the letter “Z,” and dropped “Wanna Know”, a response only worthwhile for revealing that one of T.I.’s friends once peed on Drake in a movie theater.

Meek’s response was so categorically botched you would’ve thought it was handled by FEMA. It was like he lit a blunt and accidentally burned down his house. Yet its universal dismissal went deeper than just clowning a bad rap song; “Wanna Know” was a fatal miscalculation of the way the Internet and commercial rap music currently work. From the Funkmaster Flex bombs to the Festivus-ian airing of grievances, Meek wrongly believed that he could annihilate his rival by simply highlighting Drake’s cultural felonies.

Meek Mill: "Wanna Know" (via SoundCloud)

But Drake flouts hip-hop ethics that often seem anachronistic in a constantly accelerating world of nihilist-flavored capitalism. He uses hip-hop “authenticity” when convenient: the Hot 97 “freestyle” where he reads the lyrics off his Blackberry; the Sprite lyrics campaign with Rakim, where he’s quoted as being on a “mission trying to change the culture.” As though “culture” could be singular in 2015. As though his “mission” involved more than just expanding the lane that Kanye left him while fostering a collective acceptance of $3,000 turtlenecks that look like they’re from T.J. Maxx.

Meek Mill failed to grasp that most Drake fans never took their hero at face value in the first place. No one actually believed that Wheelchair Jimmy was catching bodies. If Meek Mill lives by the rules of “Stop Snitching,” Drake’s fans blew up the prosecutor of Meek’s probation violation case, begging her to arrest him. Drake makes music for Instagram captions, music that only understands consequences as a plot device. Drake possesses the requisite cache of irony and self-awareness required to thrive in an era where viral content is synonymous with quality. He’s the cleverest of the basic bros, more algorithm than artist, the logical endpoint of one-percent economics constantly engulfing new markets in order to grow.

It was going to take more than calling out the creative integrity of a guy whose credo is “all I care about is money and the city where I’m from.” If Kanye is rap’s Steve Jobs, Drake is the CEO of Snapchat. So when he followed up the Golden Owl Massacre of 2015 with the “Hotline Bling” video, Drake achieved that final state of technological singularity: When man becomes meme.

III. http://giphy.com/search/drake-laughing