Drake Tops R&B/Hip-Hop Chart for Record 13th Week — SkimNews
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- Drake earned his 13th week atop Billboard's Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart on Sept. 5 with Iceman, surpassing the 12-week run of Take Care from more than a decade ago.
- Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us" fueled a cascade of real-world fallout: disabled journalist Christopher Alvarez was pulled into conspiracy theories, a now-31-year-old woman had to publicly dispute the significance strangers assigned to an onstage kiss from when she was 17, and Drake alleged in a lawsuit against UMG that threats forced him to pull his seven-year-old son out of school.
- Drake announced a new project, "Fear of Missing Out," cryptically slated for release this week, which the piece calls "a second kind of Drake Renaissance."
- The 2024 feud played out amid Elon Musk's reconstruction of Twitter and the rise of sophisticated AI tools, with AI-generated response tracks circulating before Drake released his actual reply "Push Ups."
- Metro Boomin and Jay-Z both publicly said fans had turned the battle into something sinister, though Jay-Z also tossed jabs at Drake in a freestyle at the Roots Picnic this year.
- Drake's Iceman track "Ran to Atlanta" directly pushes back at the idea that anyone was qualified to arbitrate culture on behalf of Black people as a whole.
Why it matters: Drake reclaiming the top of Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop chart two years after being the internet's most vilified target suggests the audience's appetite for moral-mob consensus has cooled faster than the industry expected, with implications for how future celebrity feuds get metabolized online.
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