These arguments became the subject of much of Drakeo’s music, which is unsurprising. But it also provided him with a new, delightfully slippery internal logic—or illogic, an incentive to obfuscate his meaning and challenge listeners to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. This began in earnest on Thank You for Using GTL, the album he recorded, with the producer JoogSzn, over the phone from Men’s Central Jail in downtown L.A. In addition to being a staggering display of technique—Drakeo nails the tightrope timing and askance parentheticals of each verse in a series of unbroken takes—GTL ends with a song whose hook goes: “It might sound real, but it’s fictional/I love that my imagination gets to you.”
When he was out, he began to provoke the bullpens of cops and detectives who, he had learned during the trial, rack up overtime while on endless scrolls through rappers’ Instagram feeds. The Undisputed Truth opens with an eerily poised song called “Perfect Eulogy” in which he boasts that he could have someone killed in exchange for “a promo post.” If rap music, Instagram, and Instagram posts about rap music are going to be read as terroristic threats, the argument seems to go, we might as well wield them as such.
Throughout the album, Drakeo pokes at that increasingly porous line between the real and the fictional with superb formal vision. The clarity and concision of his language in the opening six bars of “Bop Bop Bleed Em” makes it all the more chilling when he breaks form; every single line on the Icewear Vezzo duet “Rerock the Hook” could in fact be looped four times as a chorus, and yet each seems to have come off the top of his head. On “Vince McMahon,” Drakeo lapses into one of his most original modes, seeming to be amused and astonished by himself in real time. His asides, as ever, are singular—a long run of braggadocio on the excellent 03 Greedo collaboration “Not The 1” is interrupted by worries about a particular SUV’s paint color that seem to shake Drakeo to his core.
The Undisputed Truth can be dizzying, both for its sheer technical wizardry and for the aforementioned ways he prods those First Amendment questions about his intent. But then, at once, that posture falls away. “Lately, all I can think about is violence,” he raps at the very beginning of the penultimate song, “I’m the Reason.” Placed elsewhere—earlier on the album, on a sunnier beat—that same line might play as yet another taunt for detectives. But here it is an admission—one that takes on far more gravity after his death. “Reason” is followed by an outro where Drakeo expresses his bemusement at the poor work ethic and lack of business savvy exhibited by his peers. Rappers need to drop music frequently these days, he says. “If I decide to stop making music, there’s going to be 50 me’s,” he says. To hear the pervasiveness of his influence over contemporary rap, he’s right. But these are copies of copies, to diminishing returns; the genuine article is impossible to recreate.
