Drake Hotline Bling

No. Yes. That's all you need.

On October 19, 2015, Drake released the music video for "Hotline Bling." The Canadian rapper danced in a series of colorful rooms, performing moves that the internet immediately recognized as meme gold. One frame in particular caught fire: Drake holding his hand up dismissively, looking disgusted, contrasted with Drake nodding approvingly, looking pleased.

By October 31, 2015, the first Drakeposting appeared on 4chan's /v/ board. By January 2016, it had snowballed into one of the most ubiquitous formats on the internet. The template was elegant: top panel shows Drake rejecting something, bottom panel shows Drake embracing something else. Simple. Flexible. Infinitely remixable.

Drakeposting worked because it required almost no context. The format was self-explanatory: this bad, that good. You could compare anything—programming languages, food preferences, life choices, political positions. Drake became the universal arbiter of taste.

The meme spawned countless variants. Cat Drake. Female Drake. Every conceivable celebrity, animal, and cartoon character was eventually formatted into the Drake template. It became so prevalent that using it unironically became its own form of irony. Its spiritual successor, Kombucha Girl, would later occupy the same binary-reaction niche with chaotic TikTok energy where Drake had offered smooth detachment.

Drake himself seemed bemused by his transformation into a reaction image. The Hotline Bling video had already been mocked for his dad-at-a-barbecue dancing; becoming the face of binary preference was just the next evolution.

By 2019, Drakeposting had been so thoroughly strip-mined that even variations on the format felt tired. The meme didn't die so much as achieve permanent background radiation status—always there, rarely notable.

But somewhere out there, Drake is still nodding approvingly at things he likes. And that's beautiful.