Dear Gossips,
Kanye West held another listening event last week at Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta for the second week in a row to promote his upcoming, highly anticipated album, Donda. Not sure how surprising it is that even though he’s been camping out there for weeks now to push the finishing touches on the tracks, Donda is still not yet available. And now it’s going to be this coming Friday…or is it?
While some are attributing the delay to his perfectionism, or his inability to meet a deadline, others have another theory: that Kanye is deliberately holding Donda because he’s waiting for Drake to drop his also highly anticipated and super delayed next album, Certified Lover Boy.
CLB was supposed to come out in January but then again, Drake too has been cavalier with deadlines throughout his career. He recently said it was done though, we’re just waiting on an official announcement of when he plans to release it… and that’s what people are speculating that Kanye is waiting on too. So that they can go head-to-head – as Variety pointed out, Ye did the same thing in 2007 with 50 Cent, and eventually out-sold 50 with his album Graduation.
Kanye and Drake have been on-and-off beefing for years now, exchanging barbs on their respective songs and sometimes through their collaborators. Which is what happened in 2018, when their feud escalated to its most incendiary point after the Drake and Pusha T traded diss tracks, culminating in Pusha T’s “The Song of Adidon” which is when it was blown open that Drake was allegedly hiding a son. Drake apparently blamed Kanye, who produced Pusha’s album Daytona, for leaking that information. It’s a story that immediately entered the Gossip Hall of Fame. The culture was consumed with this conflict for weeks, if not months.
That said, the latest update on Kanye and Drake is that they’re on good terms again. Or at least civil terms. And if that’s the case, is Ye really holding Donda to set up a competition? Or is it just that he really is still working on the album? Is it possible that these two heavyweights will battle for album release supremacy? Is this, um, what we want? A proper album-off? Is this what they know that we want? Is there also a chance that they’re encouraging this kind of intrigue?
Bennifer’s been giving us a summer of love. Are Kanye and Drake about to end the summer on beef?
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
