This Is Not A Defense Of Gatekeeping

Drake went out sadder than any musician in recent memory.

It’s not just that he picked a fight against Kendrick Lamar, one of the most respected musical artists in the industry, and lost. It’s not just that the resulting battles irreparably shattered his public image, destroyed his reputation as a hit-maker, brought his unpalatable histories about his conduct around girls and young women back into the public eye during a time of intense media scrutiny towards predators in the entertainment industry, and revealed that he is potentially hiding multiple unacknowledged children. It’s not even that he had to hold back tears on a track while trying to show everyone how Not-Mad he was about people calling attention to how fucking weird he was around Millie Bobby Brown, before posting Instagram stories showing that he’s in his feelings watching sad gangster movies alone in his mansion at 5am contemplating his legacy and his mortality after the second attempt on his life in as many days.

It’s not even that he might be doubling down and coming back for more after he ‘bowed out’ of the beef on The Heart Part 6, if internet rumors are anything to go by.

It runs so much deeper than that. It’s the story of a man being consumed by the very mechanisms that created him. A man who rose to prominence off his mastery of internet culture and his ability to turn any confrontation into a joke having to face up to the fact that the magic doesn’t work any more, the internet is a much different place than it was in 2009, and that everyone he burned on his way up, from artists to oldheads to critics, is there to dance on his grave now the chips are down.

It’s the story of a man who ultimately has to come to terms with his own growing irrelevance in the face of a changing internet.

Drake is going out like Conor McGregor. And nobody, in any industry, wants to go out like Conor McGregor.

Conor McGregor’s rise, fall, and failures to rise again have been extensively documented within MMA fandom and broader sports journalism. In a sport that was largely stereotyped as anonymous bald men with terrible tattoos wrestle-humping each other to time limit decisions, McGregor brought a force of personality and endless quotables that took MMA out of the rut it had been in after the initial success of TUF failed to expand MMA beyond the Tapout shirt audience and brought the UFC perilously close to the mainstream. McGregor was afforded advantageous treatment by the UFC off his value to the company in the wake of the WME merger, spared from any fight he couldn’t easily win, and handed opportunities that other fighters had to quit the UFC to try and attain, all while being a loud-mouthed dork who seemed to increasingly buy into his own manufactured public image until he fucked around and said the wrong thing to a different kind of fighter than the guys who were happy to play along with McGregor’s increasingly reprehensible trash talk if they got a payday out of it. Khabib broke McGregor’s invincible aura and Dustin Poirer broke McGregor’s leg, and the casual audience saw what the die-hards had been saying since day one: the emperor never had any clothes on, and he sure as shit never deserved the crown that the fans and promotion had handed over to him.

As I originall wrote this article, McGregor was poised to try and make a comeback fight against Bellator also-ran Michael Chandler in June, his one chance to set up a rematch against Poirer and get at least some of his dignity back against the man who shattered his leg. He pulled out, citing a broken toe, and has been building something that could resemble ‘hype’ from a distance for a return bout in February by ineptly calling out Dan Hooker, a fighter who has repeatedly turned down fighting McGregor on that date because he’d rather be present for the birth of his child.

The internet culture that birthed McGregor has long since passed him by. McGregor’s aura was built on ‘My dad can beat up your dad’-esque arguments on Twitter and the Sherdog forums, hyped by podcast taste-makers like Joe Rogan, on long-form discussions of how Conor would fare against fighters he had no business being in the octagon with. (spoilers: they would always say Conor would win, by knockout). Obviously, forums no longer really exist as a going concern, while Twitter has split and fractured into a half-dozen competing platforms that will never become the hegemonic behemoth that used to control all discourse in all facets of public life. Podcasts are almost unanimously pivoting to video, because it turns out very few people actually listen to them and even fewer people make money off them, Rogan’s Spotify deal turned out to be terrible for the relevance of everyone involved, and to top it all off, McGregor just isn’t a man made for IG Live or Tiktok or any of the other algorithm-driven video content platforms that have grown in popularity since his rise to fame. His quotables seem forced outside of carefully curated video packages, and his fights stopped lending themselves to short-form video content when he started being on the wrong end of knockouts.

He just doesn’t have the juice for this kind of internet.

It’s a lesson Drake is unwilling or unable to learn in his possibly-over feud with Kendrick Lamar.

Drake was a creature of stolen memes and Twitter bots fighting a war decided through Tiktok, a medium he has never truly understood despite his past successes in starting dance trends on the platform. Trying to keep his songs ‘PG’ and easily radio-edited for the saccharine, sanitized walled gardens of modern social media prevented him from expressing the depths of hatred that Kendrick has been able to maintain this entire feud, making even his most visceral allegations about Kendrick’s character sound fake and insincere. He wasted valuable time in the feud shooting a traditional music video for Family Matters, time that allowed Kendrick to respond with his own track, ‘Meet The Grahams’ in twenty minutes. His use of AI voices made everyone on one side of a hot-button issue in the entertainment industry despise him, and Tupac’s estate is sued him for using an AI Tupac filter on the track. His label’s use of copyright strikes and demonetization is making his defenders unable or unwilling to gain any traction posting reaction content or memes involving his tracks of Family Matters and The Heart Part 6, and his label’s dedication to copyright-striking criticism likely started this mess in the first place if the stories told by multiple parties about Cease & Desists sent by Drake’s camp are even remotely true. He woke up the notoriously feral true crime girls by asking them to find receipts for his unacknowledged offspring or sexual misconduct allegations.

Drake was just not equipped for this kind of battle.

Internet culture has always rewarded the fake disruptor, those elite few personalities who can break out of the hyper-targeted segments of the internet’s propensity to silo everyone into small circles based on niche interests and bring what was previously an isolated fandom to a casual audience while helping to uphold (or at least being very nonthreatening towards) the same hegemonic structures that produce that niche art form.

Usually, this happens half by accident, and half by design. Any act that gets labeled as a ‘nepo baby’ or an ‘industry plant’ can never become that disruptive presence, because the hand of the industry is felt to clearly on their push. There has to be a hook. Something that allows people with little or no interest in the medium to pretend, however shallowly, that this shit is deeply important to them for as long as their parasocial investment in that disruptive figure lasts.

That these disruptors usually have the backing of the industry ‘machine’ means nothing to the casual audience, because these new fans don’t have the history with that art form to recognize when it’s present. As long as they feel like the disruptor is doing something different from their preconceptions about the genre, that you’re ‘in’ on a joke by supporting them over people who represent the tastes and values of the cultural niche they stand in opposition to, the good times keep rolling.

The result is always this: an individual who doesn’t fit the established stereotype of their art form catches fire, usually through their use of the media tools and connections available to them, and the dynamics of being a fan of that artform change overnight. Suddenly, any enthusiast space around that fandom has to deal with a large influx of casual fans who are there largely to support that disruptor and whose presence can often be antithetical to the values of the ‘scene’ and detrimental to the health of the artform. Resentment boils over almost immediately, which only doubles down when the core fanbase’s chosen heroes get passed over again and again in favour of affording more and more opportunities to the breakout star.

Proximity to the star becomes proximity to success. Fans of Conor McGregor aren’t fans of the MMA, or even fans of the UFC, so more and more of the promotional machine was devoted to him at the expense of a generation of fighters the core audience wanted to see more. Drake becomes the center of the music industry, and any rising star in the industry needed to hitch their wagons to him in order to see any chart success. In both instances, it left ‘the industry’ utterly rudderless at times in which their top stars were unavailable, with the core audience burned out and the casual fans not showing up to anything that didn’t have their guy in it.

But core audiences always reassert themselves, eventually, and every bit of resentment you incite on the way up finds its way back home when the fans who have grimaced their way through your ascent get to finally enjoy your downfall. To be the crossover star is to be impeachable until someone makes you bleed.

Kendrick had all of TikTok dancing on Drake’s grave. McGregor got carried out on a stretcher with his leg hanging off.

Grand opening, grand closing. The core fanbase always reasserts its tastes and values once the good times end, and the symbols of the bad old days get thrown to their torches.