Drake is not happy. In fact, one might say that Drake is quite upset.
How can we know this? Well, it just so happens that Drake has released a new single entitled “I’m Upset,” in which he declares that he is, you know, very upset.
The rapper, who has always been known for having impeccable restraint when it comes to his emotions, did not halt his characteristic subtlety with the release of the new single.
Drake doesn’t seem to be afraid to put a limit on the number of people and things with which he is upset — and, in some ways, this cheapens the song.
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In one verse, Drake starts off by appearing to champion the women in his life, but immediately flips what could have been a somewhat empowering verse by referring to a woman (who is probably the person who, in Drake’s eyes, wronged him) as a “ho.”
“Thankful for the women that I know / Can’t go 50/50 with no ho / Every month I’m supposed to pay her bills / And get her what she want,” he raps.
This points to a larger problem that Drake has been dealing with since the inception of his career. He can see value in women if they perform in a way that he deems satisfactory, but with any infraction, they immediately lose any value they might have once had to him.
The single does, however, come with what appears to be a pretty clever Beyoncé reference. In “I’m Upset,” Drake raps, “Say she got some thing she gotta come here and collect / that shit is in a box to the left, to the left,” which may be a callout to a person of romantic interest in his life who has since wronged him.
It seems somewhat rich, then, for Drake to reference Beyoncé — who is an outspoken feminist — in the same song in which he refers to a woman as a “ho.”
We will, however, withhold judgment on the full album for now, despite this misogynistic single. There is no telling how “I’m Upset” works in relation to other songs on Drake’s new album, so it’s possible that the rest of them are full of emo vibes and Beyoncé references and free of derogatory jabs at women.
“I’m Upset” is the follow-up to Scorpion’s first single, “Nice For What,” and is accompanied by what is presumably the album’s cover art — a scorpion standing on a human skeleton hand, juxtaposed against a red-hued hazy moon. In an Instagram post about the new single captioned, “Anyways...back to this album...new single out now!!!” Drake made it clear that the “I’m Upset” is part of his upcoming album, Scorpion, rather than, say, a one-off diss track that comes along with a $100,000 invoice for Kanye West and Pusha T.