Do we like Drake?
Our score: 5 out of 10. Some real good (big public giving, a Gaza ceasefire letter) sits next to lyrics critics say demean women and a pending gambling-promotion suit.
Drake turned 40 this October, and he's hardly slowing down. Billboard Canada reports he's the first act past 350 million RIAA-certified units, and the Backstreet Boys crashed his birthday party to sing I Want It That Way. Whatever you think of him, he's a chart machine.
The big story of his year is Iceman, which dropped in May alongside two surprise albums, Habibti and Maid of Honour. Variety's reviewer called it relentlessly vindictive and said it was largely about betrayal, with Drake taking aim at rappers, a DJ and former friends. So it's the Kendrick Lamar feud hangover, set to a beat.
The most talked-about line was a dig at DJ Khaled over his silence on Palestine. The National reports Drake had signed the Artists4Ceasefire letter calling for a Gaza ceasefire in October 2023, though the paper also says he has never directly commented on the conflict. Where you land depends on whether you read it as a pointed call-out or a diss that happens to use Gaza.
On the harm test, nothing turned up where he's gone after LGBTQ+ people, and he's not part of any conspiracy-theory slide that we found. The sticking point is women: a 2023 theGrio opinion piece argued his digs at women had become more pointed, citing a line about Megan Thee Stallion on Circo Loco. That's one columnist's reading, not a ruling, but it's a recurring complaint. He has also called Trump a ‘fucking idiot’ on stage in 2018, which is a plus for plenty of people reading this.
The planet side is thin. In 2022 he was slammed over short private-jet hops, and he replied that “nobody takes that flight”, saying the plane was just being moved to storage. That's his side, and critics weren't all convinced.
Then there's the gambling mess. A federal class action filed on 31 December 2025 alleges Drake and streamer Adin Ross were paid to promote the Stake.us gambling site and that Drake used bots and streaming farms to inflate play counts. None of that is proven, and the ABA Journal reported no response from him. Separately, a songwriter dropped a Janice STFU copying suit, which Drake had called baseless.