“Back to Back” by Drake

Drake’s “Back to Back” dares other rappers to challenge him, while belittling their career.

He uses several references in the first verse to describe how he is ahead of the rap game. For instance, he likens his success to that of Michael Jordan consecutively winning titles in 1996,1997 and 1998. Although the rapper admits that he initially did not reply to disses, he felt like this time he had no option than to reply to the allegations. His mention of waiting four days for a response is one of the clearest lines that indicate he was dissing Meek Mill. This is because, the rapper first released a diss track Charged Up, and then released this track four days later, still with no response from Meek until a day after this.

Throughout the song, the rapper brags about how he receives better treatment from his fans, how he easily produces gold-certified records, and sells out shows. He even takes a swipe at Meek’s former relationship with Nicki Minaj, stating that Meek is no where near their level.

This track happens to be the second of the rapper’s responses to fellow rapper Meek Mill who alleged in a July 2015 tweet that Drake uses ghostwriters.

Drake’s Feud with Meek Mill

In hip-hop terms Drake and Meek Mill could originally be classified as homeys, as they have a collaboration history dating back to 2012. However, in 2015, Meek took what appeared to be an unprovoked swipe against Drizzy.  He did so by basically saying that Drake doesn’t write his own raps, which is an insult akin to saying J. K. Rowling did not write “Harry Potter”. This allegation resulted in a situation in which people from all over the hip-hop industry began chiming in, many of them against Drake. But Drizzy had his supporters also.

So what transpired is that Drake retaliated, and the two artists began taking jabs at each other. And on top of them beefing on the side, they came out with a quite a few formal diss tracks. The first two, “Charged Up” and “Back to Back”, were by Drake. Then Meek retaliated with the track “Wanna Know”. Drake then dissed Meek in a song called “Summer Sixteen”, to which Mill responded with a tune entitled “War Pain”.

So for a couple of years Drake versus Meek Mill was the top rivalry in hip-hop. Then in late-2018 the two rappers publicly squashed their beef. And around that same time they also started collaborating again when Meek Mill dropped a track called “Going Bad” featuring Drake.

That being said, another aspect of that former beef which cannot be logically overlooked is that Meek had just started publicly dating Nicki Minaj, a former girlfriend of Drake, around the same time he first dissed Drizzy.