Knox Hill - SCRUB - Drake & Akademiks Diss (Initial Thoughts & some Lyrical Breakdown)

 So, I was just in the bus on my way home from work when this certain someone decided to surprise drop a diss track! I've been exhausted all day for some reason, but I'm gonna try my best to say something. Won't attempt to do a full breakdown today, however, I don't have the energy today.

The beat is from TLC's song No Scrubs, a 90s pop classic. In the lyrics, they describe "a scrub" as "A guy that thinks he's fly / And is also known as a busta / Always talkin' about what he wants / And just sits on his broke ass". They're guys who think they're "all that", that people like them, want them, respect them, etc, but irl, everyone thinks they're losers. Def fits Drake...

For anyone from the future: This song was made because of the lawsuit Drake filed in 2024 against his record label, in the aftermath of the beef with Kendrick that he lost. The lawsuit mentioned several reaction channels by name, because Drake claims those people were paid to give Kendrick favorable reviews on his diss tracks against Drake. Some reactors and their family members have received death threats from Drake fans. Also, mentioning reaction channels in the lawsuit like that might make labels not like reaction channels as much, in the fear of being sued. "Better safe than sorry, lets not allow them to react to this or monetize this", and so on and so forth.

One more thing before I get into the lyrics and what I can break down straight away, off the top of my head / with minimal googling:
In this blog, I try to avoid talking about artists I don't like. One of my core values / life philosophies is to put as much good into the world as I can, to outweigh the bad I accidentally put into it because I'm only human, with the end goal of having an overall more positive impact and legacy that I leave behind than a negative one. One way that I do that is by avoiding trash talking artists I don't like. Another reason to do that is that the exposure, even in a tiny blog like mine that barely anyone reads, helps their name pop up in the algorithm and I don't want that.

(PS. I don't even show up on Google anymore. My translation blog and my Blogger profile do, but not this blog directly. It might be because of all the swearing and because a couple of my posts got age restricted - I got it manually removed from an Ashnikko lyrical breakdown, I think it was for the song STUPID because the lyrics mention a certain Hub for adult content and that might have been a forbidden buzz word, but the Scene Queen album post is still age restricted because of all the sexual song titles. I don't give a fuck about "making it" or whatever, this is just a publicly shared personal notebook of sorts, an outlet, not a thing I do to become famous. I don't want to be famous and known by everyone, I just want people on the same wavelength as me to find the content I put out. So, I will continue to be as uncensored as I have before. Fuck Google and fuck algorithms. If it's meant to be that you'll find my blog, then you will.
I sometimes need to google my own blog if I don't have access to a computer and want to read a post I've made before on my phone without going to Edit Mode.)

But now, I'm gonna talk my shit about Drake. I fucking hate that guy. I've always hated him, ever since I first saw him. It was when his music started popping off and it was played on radio all the time, etc, so much so that I couldn't avoid hearing him. His music sucks! I never understood why it made the numbers it did and why all the hiphop heads were saying he's a good rapper. He's not. His music has always been overrated as fuck. Autotuned crap. For years, I was just looking for a valid reason to hate him so I would have a real reason to hate him other than "his music sucks, why do you praise him??". And then I saw SEVERAL video clips of him kissing and groping his minor fans on stage. That 17yo ain't the only one, Drake / his team have just been scrubbing the internet clean! There used to be several clips of him grinding on minors. This was a regular thing on his shows - he'd get a female fan on stage and he'd perform a kind of ballad love song / Magic Mike performance on the girl/woman, not giving a single fuck if she's minor, often KNOWING that she IS a minor. I think it's the 17yo girl clip where he also comments on her boobs after he hears her age, something like "then why do you have those?" Umm, Drake? Because hormones? Because titties are usually the first thing to change when a girl STARTS to go through puberty, around the age of 10 to 13. They sell "practice bras" for pre-teens for a reason. It's not just because the girl wants to feel like an actual teen or adult, it's because she needs the tiny amount of support and coverage those bras give. A 17yo is late in her teens, most girls her age have boobs. Trust me, every woman is well aware of her boobs existing, you don't need to point them out.
Anyway, those clips gave me a real, proper reason to hate the guy and now it's been like a decade, and other people are finally catching up.

The bars I understood right off the bat / after a simple google search

- Drake and Ak in bubble baths & in couples therapy, etc etc - I actually don't know who DJ Akademiks is. I only got into rap a couple years ago and haven't heard that name before this lawsuit stuff. But I think he's a DJ and defending Drake, the bromance they got is why Knox is implying there's a romantic relationship with bubble baths and couple's therapy (did Ak and Drake fight? why are they in therapy? Idgaf what's up with Drake, I don't follow his life, so Idk)

- "they cuddlin with bubble rap" vs. "bubble wrap"

- "hey anything to cuff a bag and dub the numbers back" - yup. Drake's desperately trying to get his career, with the money and the streaming numbers back, after Kdot destroyed him. Thank you Kendrick <3 Sorry for doubting you when the disses started! (I said somewhere online, I think it was on Knox's comments, on one of the early diss tracks of this latest round, that "I doubt it's enough to end his career, but maybe there's hope" or something like that)

- "law-suits"... I wonder why it's spelled with a hyphen... there's double I'm missing...

- "check his wheelchair - Jimmy never walked the walk" - he played a character named Jimmy on some old tv show I've never watched, and Jimmy is in a wheelchair. "They talk the talk but don't walk the walk", he says one thing and does another.

- "Quentin Miller gave him scrips" - yeah, like, Drake didn't even write his songs! he basically just made sounds that vaguely resemble human speech, that sometimes follow a rhythm and hit some notes - no worries if they're not the intended ones or off-key, autotune exists - and became a gazillionare or something. (This one I had to google, I had forgotten this. Like I said, I don't really follow Drake's career, cause I just don't give a fuck about how he's doing.)

- "that autotune gave him pitch" yup

- "that autotune gave him pitch so he could balk to y'all"... I don't get it but I want to. There's a double there somewhere... PS. This is the first time I've heard the word "balk", had to look it up, and I still don't get this sentence.

- "Lawbrey leave that mag holstered" - Drake's real name is Aubrey Graham, and seems like after the lawsuit people have started calling him Lawbrey. That's funny. Had to google what is a "mag" and apparently it means talking? Leave the talking holstered, like "shut the fuck up, Lawbrey".

- "while he carry-on/carrion with birds" - holstered, carry-on (gun bars); carrion is a bird that eats dead animals or a despicable human being; birds could also mean chicks, like girls/women, but I don't know...

- "they gon trap vultures" - carrions, vultures, the birds that eat dead animals; trap like the music genre vs. trap, like, capture someone

- "but this man the William O'Neal of the rap culture" - ooh, I didn't know who William was but now I do. Wow. He was a black man working for the FBI, who infiltrated the Black Panther Party. That's bad. Selling out his own. Def the same that Drake's doing, I agree. Betraying his own people.

- "So many stranger things no wonder you take L's" - Drake is strange, doing strange things, and he's "taking L's", taking losses; VS. the tv show Stranger Things and the character L, who was played by the then-teenaged Millie Bobby Brown, mentioned in the next bar. Her and Drake were texting, and she's not the only minor celeb he's been grooming, he talked to Billie Eilish as well, and I think I'm forgetting a few people, I think this was a bigger pattern. How Millie and Billie have talked about the texting makes it pretty fucking obvious it's grooming. It's harrowing to listen what they've told - how they don't even know how Drake got their numbers, the things he's said to them, and how the statement the girls made about how he's allegedly not a creep are pretty much identical = DEFINITELY not written by the girls.

- "I hope the millies age well" - Millie Bobby Brown & millies like millions, the fortune Drake's made

- "I just hope you got the message, I just hope you learned a lesson" - I don't. I hope your career dies and you disappear. I will not miss you. Bye. You suck.

- "Houston we have a problem" - he mentioned Texas a couple bars back VS Houston, we have a problem - Wikipedia

- "ask Rihanna - he's obsessive" - oh, that thing as well! he, like, kept messaging her and trying to get with her and she was like ewww, leave me the fuck alone and he just kept going. I think he saw it as being persistent and cute and that she'd eventually admit she likes him (=he was being a scrub), but nah. She REALLY didn't like him and everyone else except Drake thought his behavior was creepy. No means no. (And women who say otherwise, who want a man to "just try harder", who are playing hard to get - stop it. Think about all the women who have stalkers because the guys going after them have heard the phrase "try harder" too many times. That kind of toxic teachings boys hear need to stop. Stop playing games with men's emotions. If you like him, tell him. If you feel like he won't respect you if you give it up too easily, then guess what - he won't respect you even if you don't, even if you make him work for it. He was never worth your time and attention in the first place.)

- "my bad, did I push the tea" - Pusha-T the rapper. idk why, but it's obvious this bar's about him being involved in this somehow VS "to spill the tea", to have gossip about someone

- The Story of Adidon - Wikipedia ah, ok. it was this song. I remember this being mentioned somewhere, probably in one of the Kdot diss tracks about Drake. In this song, The Story of Adidon, Pusha-T reveals Drake has a son with a former pornstar, and the son's name is Adonis (Knox mentions the name later in this song, SCRUB)

- "We like it when you sing" speak for yourself, I don't. And you can't know if you'd like it, he's always so autotuned. So I guess I can't know either.

- "you movin' shady but without the coup de grâce" - they're being sus, but there's no final blow to end them? VS Eminem's latest album was called The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce). Spoiler alert: Slim doesn't die either.

- "bring it back to rap" - oh, and layer, too! the new Em album was self-reflection on the past, on the character of Slim Shady and his relation to Eminem and his career trajectory. Knox is calling out Drake to have a similar "wake up call" about his behavior and past, to stop pulling these pussy ass moves like lawsuits and settle things like real rappers do, with rapping. Stop being a rich bitch who settles everything with money and start being a respectable man of the culture, god dammit. The police and the law are not traditionally considered friends of rappers. They're on different sides of history, and you're supposed to be on the rappers' side. The people's side, not the higher elite's side. 

- "how you gon act cis/axis / then turn bitch" axis, turn VS Drake is a cis man, but he's acting like a bitch, a woman (so he's "trans")