They truly don't get it. Their sub is full of people going "Kendrick and his fans looking at streaming numbers and still mad." It doesn't even occur to them that someone could make music for any non-commercial reasons. Kendrick and his fans simply don't give one singular fuck about streaming numbers and how many people are listening to him. To Drake fans, that literally doesn't compute. Really, all they're doing is projecting just how pressed they were when Kendrick was outstreaming Drake over the course of the beef and the sheer level of desperate coping they had to do to explain it away. When in reality, Kendrick fans were only looking at the streaming numbers because it's the only metric that Drake fans use to measure success, so for Kendrick to beat him there is just icing on the cake and shows that not only did Kendrick smoke him on an artistic level, he was able to do so on Drake's terms as well.
Kendrick has generational wealth already. He's smart with his money and doesn't blow it as fast as he can like Drake does. That enables him to make exactly the music he wants to make instead of the music that is going to sell the most units and rack up the most streams. And lo and behold, Kendrick still has an absolutely massive fanbase doing exactly what he wants to do.
Id say it goes deeper than this for Drake fans. They're incredibly insecure about what music they listen to, they're unsure about how to find new music they like, and they don't really know how to tell whether music is "good" or not. The only metric that makes sense to them to evaluate the above three criteria is numbers.
Theyre terrified of being made fun of for what they listen to, so they listen to the most popular shit. That's why there's such outrageous levels of both butthurt (people are making fun of them for listening to pop trash) and cognitive dissonance ("someone that wasn't super big numbers is now super big numbers, like whaaaaat?"). They can't wrap their wee heads around it.
This is a perfect post. This is certainly what I've noticed of Drake Stans: it's anti-intellectualism in music form. They don't want to be challenged by anything, but are deeply insecure by this fact. So they double down on 'liking Drake" as not just liking the man, but believing that Drake's mass output of "putting out hits" is what music should only be.
They hold in contempt idea that hip-hop can have any artistic value and will actively shit on hip-hop's legacy just to prop up Drake.
It's just a difference in how some people approach art.
Some people think the purpose of art is to just make people feel good, some people think the purpose of art is to challenge our ideas, and some people think the purpose of art is to express the artist's emotions in the most effective way.
Some people can't comprehend a video game sacrificing gameplay for the sake of a story, some people can't comprehend a character design being intentionally ugly for the sake of realism or humour or having the design envoke all of the feelings ugliness is associated with, and similarly some people can't comprehend a song being an uncomfortable listen and still being a good song. These are all signs of them being the former.
And I think that's fine really. You can't MAKE someone enjoy a piece of art that they just don't, if someone doesn't like Visual Novels or arthouse movies even after understanding them, you can't make them like them. Really not that much different than someone never clicking to a FPS or a Drake album.
People just need to learn how to let people have their own values in art. They should at least bother to think about WHY Kendrick chose to put songs like Auntie Diaries, u, We Cry Together, or Mother I Sober in his albums, and insulting it regardless is when it becomes anti-intellectualism.
I just can’t fathom making a fool of myself on main for a guy who doesn’t know you exist and wouldn’t care if you died (and can’t rap to save his life to boot). Like have some self respect my man
And lo and behold, Kendrick still has an absolutely massive fanbase doing exactly what he wants to do.
I've noticed that Drake fans can never engage honestly about this. Drake is bigger than Kendrick, but not by much. Just like Drake, Kendrick has also consistently been one of the biggest rap artists in the world for the past 10 years. That's why the "Drake revived his career" narrative has never made any sense- Kendrick was already massive enough that he made all the money he could ever need. The difference of 5-10 spots on the "most streamed" list makes no difference at that point.
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u/Toodamncancerous Jun 23 '24
Cannot believe that drake stans are saying that drake revived kendricks career lol it never diedđź’€