Between Pusha T, Kendrick Lamar, Anthony Fantano, and many more, we’ve heard some pretty good Drake disses over the years. But now, Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) is giving everyone a run for their money with a new diss of epic proportions. Evoking the literal collapse of modern civilization to drive his point home, the seasoned rapper said that Drizzy’s output is less “hip-hop” and more like shopping at Target.
The comments came during Bey’s recent appearance on the fashion podcast The Cutting Room Floor when host, Recho Omondi, asked point-blank if he considered Drake “hip-hop.” After a pause — and a begrudging “Why are you doing this to me?” — Bey unleashed his opinion: “Drake is pop to me. In the sense, like, if I was in Target in Houston and I heard a Drake song… it feels like a lot of his music is compatible with shopping.”
Laughing, Omondi — who disclosed that she likes Drake — joked that it’s like “commercial music,” prompting Bey to offer his only quasi-complement of Drake: a description of the music as “shopping with an edge, in certain instances.”
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Continuing, Bey dug in on his distaste, illustrating the vapidness he sees in Drake’s output. Pretending to be a fan, he joked: “Woo! So many products. So many SKUs. Look at all these SKUs. Oh, so many products! I love this mall. Look at this place. I mean, look at this place! They have everything, everything’s here. They have everything here! Oh, this is great. This is the new Drake, you hear it? It’s great.”
Then, turning his jest to seriousness, Bey got to the core of his distaste. “What happens when this thing collapses?” he asked. “What happens when the columns start buckling? Are we not in some early stage of that at this present hour? Are we seeing the collapse of an empire? ‘Buying and selling’ — where’s the message that I can use? What’s in it for your audience, apart from, like, banging the pom poms?”
Elsewhere in the interview, Bey spoke about his distaste for consumption-minded media and settler colonialism, as well as his admiration for resistance movements embracing humanity. The full interview is available on The Cutting Room Floor‘s Patreon page.
Bey, for his part, has tried to embody the opposite of his criticisms of Drake with his own music. Around the 2022 release of No Fear of Time, the sophomore LP by his hip-hop duo Black Star, Bey expressed that what fans can expect from him and his partner, Talib Kweli, is “a sincere expression,” adding that the album is “who we really are, what we’re really responding to, and what’s really important to us.”
As for Drake, he augmented Target-shopping playlists this past fall with the release of Scary Hours 3. Later this month, he’s set to hit the road for a co-headlining tour with J. Cole — check out the full list of dates, and grab your tickets here.
