Forty-Three Tracks, One Crip Walk

What Drake refused to do to Serena Williams, and why his restraint is the most strategically interesting move on the album.

When Drake released Iceman, Habibti, and Maid of Honour on May 15 — three full albums on the same Friday, forty-three tracks in a single release window — the press coverage focused on volume. The label-exit verbatim on Firm Friends. The Future and Vince Staples features. The interpolation of Deniece Williams. The shots at Sir Lucian Grainge on Make Them Remember. What none of the press has surfaced yet is a single eight-syllable phrase on Track 7 of Iceman that is, by any analytical measure, the most strategically interesting bar across the entire body of work. It is not the loudest. It is not the most quoted. It is barely a couplet. And the reason it matters is because of what Drake chose not to do around it.

The line is on Make Them Pay, produced by Flywilliums and Ovrkast, built around the sampled Deniece Williams “I just wanna be free” refrain. The relevant verse reads: “I’m tryna catch one of you boys stargazin’ in the field like little leaguers, yeah / And ain’t no passes for you Crip walkin’, all of that diss talkin’, kiddo, beat it / I’m supposed to be my brother’s keeper, so don’t make us hit another buzzer beater.”

Eight syllables: *Crip walkin’, all of that diss talkin’*. That phrase is the only crip-walk reference in the entire forty-three-track release. I checked. Iceman has eighteen tracks. Habibti has eleven. Maid of Honour has fourteen. One reference across the full corpus. Drake had forty-three opportunities to write that word again. He used one of them.

To understand why that ratio matters, you have to understand what crip-walking is and what it meant when Serena Williams did it in front of more than one hundred and thirty-three million people at the Super Bowl LIX halftime show on February 9, 2025.

The crip walk originated in 1970s Compton. The Crips street gang created it as a footwork dance that literally spells the letters C-R-I-P in the air, and historically it was used to spell out and then cross out rival gang names, with documented associations to gang violence through the 1980s and 1990s. MTV banned videos containing the dance for years. Rappers caught major industry pushback for performing it through the 1990s and 2000s. It is not a neutral dance. It is gang-coded victory iconography with one of the more violent provenances in American popular dance. When Snoop Dogg or WC pulled it out in the mainstream-rap era, it was always laden with that history, and they knew it.

Serena Williams did it once before, at Wimbledon in 2012, after winning Olympic gold. She caught significant criticism then for what the sport’s commentariat called “celebrating with a gang dance” at the All England Club. She apologized in characteristic Serena fashion — without quite apologizing — and the moment faded into her catalog of small public controversies.

Thirteen years later she chose to bring it back, on the largest possible stage, during Kendrick Lamar’s performance of Not Like Us, the song the entire music industry treated as the definitive kill-shot in the Drake-Kendrick feud. Four meanings stack on top of each other in that eight-second appearance.

First, Compton solidarity. Serena was raised in Compton from age three. Kendrick is Compton-born and has built his entire artistic identity around the city. Her appearing on his stage doing the dance Compton invented was a public geographic-identity statement: she sides with Compton over Toronto. That alone would have been a meaningful gesture.

Second, gang-coded victory celebration. The crip walk is gang-affiliation iconography historically tied to rival-gang antagonism. Choosing the dance whose origin is gang-victory symbolism, performed to the song that is treated literally as dancing on Drake’s grave, makes the symbolism unmistakable. There is no innocent reading.

Third, the ex-girlfriend dimension. Drake and Serena have been linked publicly going back to 2011 or 2012. Drake’s catalog contains breadcrumbs referencing the relationship across multiple tracks, with the most explicit being the 2022 Middle of the Ocean line on Her Loss that named Alexis Ohanian directly as a “groupie.” If the relationship was real — and the public consensus is that it was something — then Serena appearing on Kendrick’s stage on the biggest televised event in America to dance victoriously on Drake’s diss-track grave reads as the alleged ex publicly choosing his most prominent enemy in the most maximal possible setting. It is personal-history weaponization at a scale ordinary humans cannot generate.

Fourth, reclamation. The 2012 Wimbledon criticism — the *tone-it-down* commentary from the sport’s old guard — gets retroactively reframed when Serena does the same dance, on a larger stage, in front of an unmoderated audience, thirteen years later. It is a middle finger to her own past critics as much as it is anything else. Identity defiance plus victory celebration plus personal-history weapon plus regional-identity claim, all in one continuous eight-second sequence.

That is the moment Drake had on his desk when he sat down to write Make Them Pay.

Consider what Drake could have written. He has, in his catalog, one of the most complete personal-history weaponization toolkits in modern hip-hop. The Pusha T era taught him what scorched-earth looks like from both sides. His own catalog contains references to Rihanna, to Bella Hadid, to a dozen women whose names show up either directly or in unambiguous code. He knows how to put a name in a song. He knows how to put a relationship in a song. He knows how to make a private moment into a stadium chorus. Drake’s lyrical signature, when he chooses to deploy it, is the unbearable specificity of receipts-from-real-life. Marvin’s Room is built on it. Hotline Bling is built on it. Take Care, the entire album, runs on it. He has the apparatus. He has the documented romantic history. He has the catalog precedent. He has, sitting in his lap, the most layered diss target the genre has ever served up to him: a four-meaning Super Bowl moment carried out by an alleged ex on the largest stage in America.

He wrote eight syllables. Plural address. No name. Embedded inside a Kendrick-targeted verse where Serena, if she’s there at all, is collateral rather than subject. “No passes for you Crip walkin’, all of that diss talkin’, kiddo, beat it” is the most oblique possible acknowledgment that the Super Bowl moment even registered on him. The “kiddo” address fits Kendrick — roughly eight months younger than Drake — more cleanly than Serena, who is five years older. The word choice *Crip walkin’* is the only thread connecting the bar to Serena specifically, and even that thread is plausibly deniable: he could be talking about anyone who has crip-walked, anyone in the broader cohort that participated in the Not Like Us moment, the dancers more generally.

That restraint is the story.

Compare the response architecture to LeBron James, who is the closest contemporary analog to Drake in terms of cultural footprint and audience scale. LeBron’s documented response to perceived slights is maximum-public-volume-on-every-occasion. Skip Bayless gets a tweet. Charles Barkley gets a long-form interview clapback. Refs get post-game press-conference rebukes. Stephen A. Smith gets confronted courtside at Crypto.com Arena, pre-game, with cameras rolling — over comments Smith made about Bronny. LeBron treats restraint as a sign of weakness, treats public engagement as the proof of strength, and runs his image management as continuous-broadcast counter-fire. He is, by temperament and by strategy, an instant-response artist.

Drake at his earlier peak — the For All The Dogs and Certified Lover Boy era — operated on a version of the LeBron model. Public callouts, continuous Instagram engagement, lyrical fingerprints on every passing slight. The 2018 Pusha T exchange is the high-water mark of that posture. The Story of Adidon weaponized Adonis. The damage Drake absorbed from that single Pusha T track — the audience-trust hit, the years of recovery from being publicly outed as a father who had kept his son private — is the durable scar that defines everything Drake has done since. Scorched-earth retaliation has a permanent reputational price. The genre’s memory is long.

Six years later, Drake has the chance to run the Pusha T playbook in reverse. Serena does the Super Bowl moment. The audience hands him the diss target. The narrative is ready-made. The bars are easy. And he refuses to write them.

There are five reasons for the refusal and they cohere into a single thesis.

The first is the Pusha T memory. Drake learned, in 2018, that scorched-earth on family or women or kids leaves a permanent stain on the audience relationship that no streaming-number recovery can erase. Adonis taught him that you can win the news cycle and lose the room. He will not write that song again, even when the target is gift-wrapped.

The second is the punching-down problem. Serena Williams is the greatest female athlete of the modern era, mother of two, a global figure whose post-tennis platform exceeds her on-court fame. Drake going nuclear on Serena Williams looks small no matter how well the bar is constructed. You do not win a fight against a person more universally beloved than you are; you only diminish yourself by entering it. The math does not work.

The third is the audience-economics problem. Drake’s commercial position is structurally dependent on his female fanbase. The streaming-volume distribution on his catalog is not gender-neutral. Going scorched-earth on the most famous female athlete alive puts tens of millions of monthly active users at audience-loyalty risk. There is no marginal pleasure-of-the-diss that overcomes the marginal streaming-cost. Drake runs his catalog as a business; the business says no.

The fourth is plausible deniability. If Drake names Serena in a song, the song retroactively confirms the entire relationship — every breadcrumb, every rumor, every alleged-but-never-confirmed detail of their dating history becomes documented in his own voice, in his own catalog, forever. The oblique route — eight syllables, plural address, no name — preserves “you cannot prove I’m talking about her” indefinitely. That is a Drake-classic deniability move from someone who runs the long game on his own narrative.

The fifth is fire discipline. Kendrick remains the target. The Super Bowl cast — Serena, the dancers, the entire visual frame — is supporting cast. Diluting the salvo by spreading fire across the cohort weakens the central message. The discipline of aiming at one target instead of the whole frame is what separates strategic operators from chaos merchants. Drake on this verse is doing strategic-operator work.

Read together, the five reasons cohere into a thesis that goes well beyond a single bar: Drake has stopped being a chaos merchant. The artist who used to torch every relationship, name every name, write every receipt into stadium choruses, is now running a different posture entirely. The Serena bar is the cleanest possible test case for that posture — maximum provocation, maximum target legibility, maximum audience expectation that he would respond hard — and he responded soft. That is not evidence of weakness. That is evidence of evolution.

The bigger pattern shows up immediately on the same album. Track 17, Firm Friends, contains the load-bearing UMG-fight verbatim of the entire release: “From mass distribution to leadin’ my own version of the revolution / Private arbitration leads to resolution,” “I will be makin’ the name change from The Boy to The Man,” and a consistent thread of OVO-supremacy, fourteen-year Noel-loyalty, structured independence from Sir Lucian’s organization. The way Drake is fighting Universal Music Group is the same way he is fighting Serena: through structured restraint, deniable obliqueness, refusal to give the opposition a quotable line, and patient long-game positioning. The actual lawsuit against Universal is a public defamation case currently on appeal at the Second Circuit — not arbitration — but the Firm Friends “private arbitration leads to resolution” framing reads as Drake telegraphing the posture in lyric form: patient resolution by structured process rather than public-stadium chaos. The Serena bar is wrapped in plural address because plural address is the patient version of the named-name bar. The same fire-discipline pattern is running in two different theaters at the same time.

That is the analytical hook the press has not gotten to yet, and it is the one that matters for understanding what Drake is becoming. The chaos merchant who wrote Back to Back in two days, who would have torched any opposing figure regardless of cost, has been replaced by an artist running a structured campaign across multiple fronts — record-label exit, public-narrative management, personal-relationship discipline — that all share the same posture. Restraint as a competitive moat. Deniability as a long-game weapon. Aimed fire as the alternative to spray-and-pray.

In that frame, the Serena bar is not a missed opportunity. It is the missing puzzle piece that explains everything else.

Forty-three tracks. Eight syllables. One crip walk. And the most interesting move on the entire album is the one Drake decided not to make.

---

Position disclosure: EMJ Capital holds no position in Universal Music Group (UMG.AS) or Vivendi (VIV.PA) as of publish date.