Month: June 2024

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Normani is a showstopping performer no matter the texture, tempo, and emotion at hand. Since her departure from Fifth Harmony, the singer proved time and time again that she can capture the attention and applause of her audience by doing just what a song calls her to do. It’s never too much, and it’s rarely underwhelming. “Waves” with 6lack, released back in 2018, is a climatic pop-leaning record that places Normani’s soaring vocals and sweet falsettos over grungy and moody production that also perfectly juxtaposes 6lack’s lower register. When given a roomy canvas, like on her 2021 song “Fair,” Normani makes sure her voice fills the room with runs that travel uninterrupted from stage to seat. On her long-awaited debut album Dopamine, she manages much of the same through performances that are not only impressive but liberating and boldly sensual in ways that add a new dimension to Normani’s artistry.

The road to Dopamine was a long one undoubtedly, but seemingly instrumental in developing the artist we hear on her 13-track debut. “Motivation,” released back in 2019, was the turning point for Normani – a prelude of sorts for Dopamine. With an upbeat spirit and triumphant production, Normani stepped out on her own to prove her readiness for the spotlight. A splashy video arrived with the song and presented Normani as a performer who could captivate at any given moment. The way we see Victoria Monét now is the journey Normani seemed ready to set out on. Dopamine is much darker and gloomier than “Motivation,” but it still grasps the attention of onlookers with the same elements: lyrics that dig deep into the emotions, production that caters rather than distracts, and a singer who sees all the tools at hand and knows just what to do with them.

Proof of this lives on “Candy Paint,” the grown-up version of “Motivation.” In an interview with Elle, Normani said the former “bridges the gap, I think, between ‘Motivation’ and where I am now.” Both aim to entice a lover with the golden gift of intimacy, but the latter plays it safe and colors inside the lines that separate discreet and compliant from defiant and bold. “Candy Paint” presents Normani on the other side of the border, where the freedom that comes with it is too good to hide. “If you let me take him, you might never get him back,” she sings with undeterred certainty. “I’m a baddie and I don’t know how to act.” This liberation is the foundation for Dopamine. It’s a flag that Normani proudly stakes into the ground in the world her debut lives in and she wastes no time exploring it.

“Big Boy” kicks off the album in dominant and assertive fashion. “Only ever see this type of sh*t in the movies,” Normani boasts over trunk-rattling production backed by New Orleans-influenced trumpets. Anchored by woozy synths and Houston’s trademark screwed-up production, Normani remains assertive on “Still” as she brags about her status and being “too busy livin’ my life.” Normani’s newfound liberation is the light at the end of the tunnel. She reached it only after a long journey that saw her work through the emotional whirlwind that included both her parents being diagnosed with cancer and the critiques of fans who were too impatient to offer her the grace to grieve and come back to music on her own terms. It should come as no surprise that Normani’s escape from the dark times has pushed her to live each day to the fullest.

Normani’s assertiveness doesn’t only take shape over grand productions that call for an epic performance. It’s just as present in more timid moments that swap the lively energy of a party for the burning passion of bedroom intimacy and the overwhelming emotions behind heartbreak. She sees no worrisome risk or penalty in being painfully honest in pain or brutally forward in her sexual desires. “Distance” begins as a timid and soft-spoken account of a partner’s failures in a relationship before erupting into an epic declaration of the end of a once-promising love story. On the flip side, Normani seduces her partner with the summoning “Lights On” as she whispers sultry requests that are sure to make the ear melt. “Don’t even address me unless you gon’ undress me,” she sings before promising to “make you come fast like a ’98 sports car.”

Dopamine delivers samples of all the lanes Normani can switch into and thrive in at any given moment. She finds comfort in the bounce and joyous trumpets of New Orleans and the woozy sounds of her Houston hometown as much as she does the vulnerable and emotional moments heartbreak can bring. With that being said, Normani’s debut is more than a display of versatility, it’s a statement of status and evidence of how she can sweep her suitors and competitors off their feet with ease. The question is never “Am I enough?” or “Can I compete?” or “Can I stand out?” for Nomani who instead, understands that she is the prize. Within the confinements of Dopamine and the mind of the artist who created the album, doubts about its quality are about as present as a skippable track on the album. Normani the person went through hell in the half-decade journey to Dopamine, but in the end, Normani the artist emerged from the fire to be the bright and free star we always knew she could be.

Dopamine is out now via RCA Records. Find out more information here.

On Juneteenth, Tyler The Creator made a surprise appearance during Mustard’s set at Kendrick Lamar’s The Pop Out — Ken & Friends concert at Kia Forum in Los Angeles. Tyler performed “WusYaName” and “Earfquake,” which was awesome when it happened, but seeing Tyler The Creator perform holds more weight now that he won’t be performing two major festivals this summer.

On Thursday morning, June 20, Tyler The Creator announced that he will no longer co-headline Lollapalooza 2024 in Chicago on August 1, and he also pulled out of co-headlining Outside Lands Festival in San Fransisco on August 10.

“I hate saying this but I have to cancel Lollapalooza and Outside Lands,” Tyler The Creator posted on X (formerly Twitter). “I made a commitment that I can no longer keep, and that bums me out knowing how excited folks were. That is not sexy at all. Please please forgive me or call me names when you see me in person. Love.”

Simultaneously, Lollapalooza announced Megan Thee Stallion and Outside Lands announced Sabrina Carpenter as their respective replacements for Tyler.

In April, Tyler The Creator headlined both Saturday nights of Coachella 2024, which stood out to Uproxx’s Aaron Williams as Tyler fulfilling “a decade-long dream” by delivering a set that “lived up to the hype.”

It isn’t a stretch to call Vampire Weekend’s 2019 album, Father Of The Bride, divisive. It is generally acknowledged by both its proponents and detractors that it created something of a schism in the fanbase, but that probably gets subdued by the fact that few would call it a disaster and few prop it up as a high point in the discography. Their claiming of jam music as both inspiration and aspiration was either lauded or shrugged off, obscuring the fact that it was a crucial moment for the band, the record where there was more to prove than ever following the departure of integral collaborator Rostam Batmanglij.

But with the release of this year’s excellent Only God Was Above Us, people’s feelings about Father Of The Bride likely impact how the new album has been approached. Many of the forays into crustier territory have receded, replaced by distorted guitar, raw recordings, and warm songwriting. It’s hard to call something a return to form when the previous album was generally liked by many, but it does feel like something was proved by this latest album. It proved that a Rostam-less Vampire Weekend can’t just succeed by reinventing themselves, they can also succeed by building on the path that culminated with the 2013 masterpiece Modern Vampires Of The City, the album that solidified them as one of the most important and successful indie rock bands of their time.

You probably don’t need me to underscore what side of the fence I fall on (and it’s important to note that even at Uproxx, we have folks holding each opinion, and even people like Steven Hyden who celebrates all sides of the Vampire Weekend dice), but that debate over whether Vampire Weekend “still have it” or whether they “never lost it” became secondary at the Hollywood Bowl last week for a sold out headlining show. Witnessing this incarnation of the band live, the narrative around Vampire Weekend should probably be that they’re a better band than they’ve ever been.

Now, I don’t claim this lightly. I’ve seen the band perform live countless times since their 2008 debut. I saw them at a Long Beach theater for a California tour ahead of Contra. I’ve seen three of their four headline sets at the Hollywood Bowl. I’ve seen them at festivals around the world. But, it wasn’t until this week that I’ve ever been blown away by the sheer magnitude of their sound.

It’s a fitting development considering the project they are touring. Only God Was Above Us is a bit louder, a bit more abrasive, and a bit more aggressive than the band’s previous work, all very much safely calibrated so it very much feels like a Vampire Weekend record. The set on this night seemed designed to fit within that version of the band, underscored by numerous showstopping moments meant to punctuate the performance. It started simply enough, with the three original Vampy Weeks members performing in front of a giant banner with their band name, pushing them right to the front of the stage. It didn’t take a detective to suspect that a banner would drop to reveal something, but that came after a few classic numbers that drew back to their classic sound: “Holiday,” “Cousins,” and “Boston.” But once bandleader Ezra Koenig stood solo for “Ice Cream Piano” only to have the banner fall and reveal an expanded lineup of touring members, a version of their best-sounding self was solidified.

Part of the success of this show rested on the shoulders of touring multi-instrumentalists that could support the songs with strings, woodwinds, and additional percussion — yes, the biggest move of their Father Of The Bride era, a second drummer, remains. Koenig seemed aware of this, taking time away from his usual front-and-center placement to literally shine a light on these supporting players — he carried around a portable LED to illuminate them — during the massive “Mary Boone.”

But it was really Koenig himself who held the show in his hands. There were experiments of Koenig roaming the stage, coming short of “choreography” but definitely exhibiting staged movements that approached something beyond bandleader. There were the decisions to honor the ska support of The English Beat and Voodoo Glow Skulls with reimagined ska versions of “Ottoman,” “Sunflower,” and “Give Up The Gun.” And, most crucially, there was Koenig’s vocal performance, which never shied away from his song’s most difficult vocal heights — see the climax of “Hannah Hunt” or the chorus of “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.” Most of his contemporaries start to sing around the hard parts as they hit middle age, but Koenig sounds better than ever when he bravely hits every note. And in turn, so does his band.

Lastly, it is impressive with how the willing the band is to honor their entire catalog in their live performances. This is something that makes or breaks a band as they approach their legacy era. Balancing the songs that everyone knows, special songs for individual occasions, and unexpected curveballs are indicators of both confidence in their own material and respect for their fandom. Scanning over their tour so far reveals wildly different shows from night to night. That places them among the live greats, the artists that can maintain careers long after their best material is out in the world. But Vampire Weekend are already there, matching the strength of their new material with the best shows of their lives.

It was probably safe to say that Kendrick Lamar “won” his little tiff with Drake back in May after Drake essentially waved the white flag and went into exile (read: on vacation) in the wake of the massive success of Kendrick’s diss track “Not Like Us” — and the epic failure of Drake’s return fire, “The Heart Part 6.”

But Kendrick Lamar wasn’t quite ready to let things lie, using his Pop Out concert in LA to not only beat a dead horse but to scorch the earth it was buried in, too. Meanwhile, Kendrick Lamar’s fiancée, Whitney Alford, was in attendance after Drake’s diss records cast aspersions on her relationship with his rival. If anyone was wondering whether Kendrick and Whitney are still together after all the hoopla generated by Drake’s diss tracks, this may not be the definitive answer they were looking for, but it seems to prove they’re still on good terms, if nothing else. (They’d have to be, they have two kids together.)

Meanwhile, the list of those celebrities who “popped out” at last night’s concert is extensive and appears to include many of those who Drake would have considered homies before. The tough breaks keep coming for the Canadian star, but he did bring this on himself.

In 1970, Brian May and Roger Taylor formed Queen by bringing in Freddie Mercury and John Deacon. The Mercury-fronted version of the band produced iconic hits like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “We Are The Champions,” “Another One Bites The Dust,” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” throughout the 1970s and ’80s before Mercury’s death due to AIDS-related bronchial pneumonia in November 1991. Three decades later, Sony Music is reportedly acquiring Queen’s catalog for £1 billion (approximately $1.27 million), as first reported by Hits.

Is Queen’s Catalog Sale For $1.2 Billion The Biggest Deal Of Its Kind Ever?

Consequence relayed, “The deal is believed to be the biggest such acquisition of its kind,” so apparently, yes.

According to Variety, Sony Music’s purported deal will include Queen’s publishing and recording rights, and “the only revenue not covered in the deal is for live performances, which founding members Brian May and Roger Taylor, who still actively tour with singer Adam Lambert, will retain.”

Variety added, “The catalog, which has been in play for several years and inching toward Sony for the past few months, is complicated by the group’s recorded-music rights for the U.S. and Canada, which were acquired by Disney, for an undisclosed price, at some point in the 2000s after an initial $10 million licensing deal that was struck in 1991. Those rights will remain with Disney in perpetuity, although certain of the bandmembers’ remaining royalties from them will go to Sony once the deal closes. Similarly, the group’s distribution deal, which is currently with Universal, will go to Sony in all territories outside the U.S. and Canada when it expires in 2026 or 2027.”

After a star-making past year, Sabrina Carpenter is hitting the road: Today (June 20), the “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” singer announced The Short N’ Sweet Tour, in support of her upcoming album Short N’ Sweet.

The trek runs from September to November, kicking off in Columbus, Ohio before hitting major venues like New York’s Madison Square Garden, Boston’s TD Garden, Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, and more. Carpenter will be supported on tour by openers Amaarae, Griff, and Declan McKenna.

Ticket pre-sales start with the Cash App Presale, on June 24 at 10 a.m. local time. That will be followed by the Team Sabrina Presale on June 25 at 10 a.m. local time. Then there’s the general on-sale, which kicks off on June 28 at 10 a.m. local time.

Visit Carpenter’s website for more information and check out the upcoming tour dates below.

Sabrina Carpenter 2024 Tour Dates: The Short N’ Sweet Tour

08/10 — San Francisco, CA @ Outside Lands Festival
09/23 — Columbus, OH @ Nationwide Arena
09/25 — Toronto, Ontario @ Scotiabank Arena
09/26 — Detroit, MI @ Little Caesars Arena
09/29 — New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
10/02 — Hartford, CT @ XL Center
10/03 — Boston, MA @ TD Garden
10/05 — Baltimore, MD @ CFG Bank Arena
10/08 — Philadelphia, PA @ Wells Fargo Center
10/11 — Montreal, QC @ Centre Ball
10/13 — Chicago, IL @ United Center
10/14 — Minneapolis, MN @ Target Center
10/16 — Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena
10/17 — Saint Louis, MO @ Chaifetz Arena
10/19 — Raleigh, NC @ PNC Arena
10/20 — Charlottesville, VA @ John Paul Jones Arena
10/22 — Atlanta, GA @ State Farm Arena
10/24 — Orlando, FL @ Kia Center
10/25 — Tampa, FL @ Amalie Arena
10/28 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center
10/30 — Dallas, TX @ American Airlines Center
11/01 — Denver, CO @ Ball Arena
11/02 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Delta Center
11/04 — Vancouver, BC @ Pacific Coliseum
11/06 — Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena
11/07 — Portland, OR @ Moda Center
11/09 — San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center
11/10 — San Diego, CA @ Pechanga Arena
11/13 — Phoenix, AZ @ Footprint Center
11/15 — Los Angeles, CA @ Crypto.com Arena

Short N’ Sweet is out 8/23 via Island Records. Find more information here.

We have reached the part of the calendar where cultural pundits reflect on the first six months of the year. Congratulations! You won a retrospective! For music critics, this means doing an inventory of 2024’s most notable albums. “Notable” can be defined in any number of ways — artistic quality, commercial success, the anachronistic “water cooler” discourse factor — but taken together these attributes ultimately speak to how memorable a particular work of art is.

But I am not interested in the notable or memorable albums of 2024 — at least not at the moment. What I am curious about is the opposite kind of album. The sort of record that is not notable and not memorable, to the point where its very existence already seems open to question.

What I’m talking about is a memory-holed album. There are a lot of them this year. As a person who is professionally obligated to remember forgotten music year in and year out, I would assert that 2024 already has more memorably unmemorable albums than normal. And I want to figure out why.

To be clear: Hundreds of albums are released every week, and 99.9 percent of them come and go with zero fanfare. And yet those records do not qualify as memory-holed. For an album to qualify as memory-holed, it must have a shot at being remembered. Therefore, it has to come from an act with a large platform. A big record label is involved. A team of publicists is on the case. The media arrives with a bounty of takes. All these things ensure a reasonable expectation that the public will care about an album. Except the public doesn’t care. They don’t care at all, spectacularly. A memory-holed album isn’t necessarily a bad album. It’s just an album that is wiped from our collective consciousness soon after it enters the world. It’s not a matter of love or hate, only indifference.

I’ll illustrate what I mean: Imagine I am holding a gun to your head. And imagine the gun is loaded. And imagine that I am the kind of maniac who will murder someone over a hypothetical scenario. Would you stake your life on guaranteeing — with 100 percent certainty — that Green Day put out a record in first half of 2024?

If you said “yes,” I have good news: Your head presently is still intact. Green Day did put out an LP, Saviors, in January, though I’m sure you did not actually know this any more than you could possibly “know” that a coin will land heads or tails. This was surely a triumph of mathematical probability, not pop-punk knowledge.

Green Day is a perfect example of the “memory-holed album” phenomenon because they have put out so many of them in the past 20 years. Just try to name a Green Day record released after American Idiot. I’ll give you extra credit if you can name a single song from any of those records. (I might also ask if you are Billie Joe Armstrong in disguise.) For Saviors, music writers dutifully reported that Green Day was back to making “political” music in the style of American Idiot (which turns 20 this year) with a dash of the snotty, n’er-do-well charm of Dookie (which turns 30 in 2024). The album was talked about a lot during a slow time of the year for music releases. It certainly had an opportunity to be remembered. Nevertheless, here I am at the end of this paragraph and I’m having trouble recalling who I was talking about at the start of the paragraph. That’s what I call a good and thorough memory-holing!

I don’t want to pick on Green Day too much, as later work by legacy rock bands typically is memory-holed by default. You might be surprised to learn that Kings Of Leon put out a record, Can We Please Have Fun, last month. Harry Styles’ producer apparently worked on it, though I doubt even he could either confirm or deny it at this point. The Black Keys recently got an extra push for their memory-holed 2024 album, Ohio Players, though for the worst possible reason: Their arena tour in support of said album was canceled. People forgot the record, but they remember the shuttered tour. The music business, like life itself, is cruel.

2024 is extraordinary thus far for how many albums you would have predicted being at least somewhat relevant not being relevant at all. Legacy rock bands have a low relevancy ceiling, but what about young and promising rock acts? The U.K. indie outfit The Last Dinner Party entered 2024 riding a wave of hype for their debut album, Prelude To Ecstasy, released in February. Comparisons to another buzzy British rock act, Wet Leg, were inevitable. For about two weeks this winter, I heard about them constantly. And then … crickets. As if a power cord was suddenly kicked out of an outlet. The same could be said for All Born Screaming, the well-reviewed seventh album from St. Vincent that was swiftly erased from the critical conversation soon after its late-April release.

(We also can’t forget to remember to forget Hymnal Of A Troubled Man’s Mind, the latest LP from one of 2023’s most buzzed-about lightning rods. Alas, the fudge rounds have fallen by the wayside in 2024.)

Let’s raise the stakes. In February, Usher performed for more than 100 million people at the Super Bowl. Two days before that, he put out his ninth record, Coming Home. Honestly! I assure you this happened! The following month, Justin Timberlake released his sixth LP, which I’m told was called Everything I Thought It Was. It came and went so fast that there was barely any time for the pre-programmed anti-JT backlash. (Don’t worry backlashers, your time has arrived.) Oh — I forgot this part — Jennifer Lopez also put out an LP, This Is Me … Now, in February that got the unfortunate Black Keys-esque “canceled tour” publicity bump a few months later.

Of those albums, only the Lopez record can be considered an out-right bomb. (It peaked at only No. 38.) The Usher and Timberlake releases both debuted in Billboard’s Top 5. But short-term success does not prevent long-term memory-holing. Think about the slowly erasing family photo from Back To The Future. A lot of memory-holed albums are like that. You can sense them fading away in real time. Two LPs that debuted at No. 2 on the chart, Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism and Kacey Musgraves’ Deeper Well, have essentially evaporated, while Ariana Grade’s Eternal Sunshine similarly feels a little fuzzy at this point despite some enduring singles.

So, why is this happening? There are numerous explanations, some of which you might have already heard. There is too much music. Attention spans are too short. Tech platforms are incentivized to push volume of songs over focusing on certain tracks that might deserve extra attention. And then there is the matter of Taylor Swift and how she has eaten the corpus of pop music in the 2020s. Her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, has stayed perched at the top of the charts for months, which has inevitably overshadowed her aforementioned pop challengers. Taylor has even affected the recent work of Billie Eilish and (sorry!) Beyoncé, whose respective albums Hit Me Hard And Soft and Cowboy Carter aren’t exactly memory-holed but feel a little memory-muted after their initial PR blitzes.

All these explanations are valid. But I would add another: The numbing and frankly dull familiarity of pop music in 2024. Here’s an honest question: How often are you surprised by what is popular? If you’re like me, the answer is “not often at all.” To be fair, this is true of all of pop culture. A feeling of déjà vu also pervades our movies and TV shows. We are in the middle of a prolonged, stagnant, “rerun” moment in so much of what we watch and listen to. And this naturally makes much of our art a lot less memorable.

Even the stuff people love feels a little warmed-over. The most acclaimed pop record of recent weeks is Brat, the latest from Charli XCX, the 31-year-old British singer who has been cast in an upstart role in relation to the hegemony of Taylor Swift. Only Charli has been played that part for more than a decade at this point. (There are countless “Charli XCX is the future of pop music” articles going back to the early 2010s to support this.) But while Brat musically is well-constructed and enjoyably frothy, lyrically it is just as self-absorbed and borderline insipid as Taylor’s overstuffed 2024 opus. (Oh, there is a song inspired by one of the co-hosts of Red Scare? This should not be a selling point for an album, it should be a point of mockery!)

The music that stands out the most in the first half of 2024 feels at least slightly unexpected — the slow-build rise of Chappell Roan in the pop world, the acclaim garnered by Cindy Lee in indie circles. And then there was the epic battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, the only pop moment that managed to dethrone Taylor Swift from the center of conversation this year. Who could have predicted at the start of the year that Kendrick would re-emerge from self-appointed exile to say hilariously mean (and slanderous) things about the most commercially successful rapper of the last 10 years? Not me. And not you, either. Though it’s possible that we’re not remembering things properly.

Travis Scott was arrested in Miami Beach, Florida on charges of disorderly intoxication and trespassing on property after a warning.

According to Miami’s WSVN, the incident took place early this morning, at 12:44 a.m. on June 20. Officers were called to the Miami Beach Marina, where Scott was reportedly getting off a charter boat when the boat owner asked him to leave. According to police, Scott “became irate screaming profanities, left and returned to disturb some more.” He was arrested at 1:17 a.m. and booked at 4:35 a.m. (at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, per NBC News).

Seemingly in reaction to the news, Scott posted on X (formerly Twitter) this morning, “Lol.”

This comes a month after Scott was involved in a scuffle at a Cannes Film Festival party in May. Scott and Alexander “AE” Edwards, who reportedly instigated the conflict, got into a physical altercation at the event, where punches were thrown.

Meanwhile, Scott recently settled the final Astroworld Festival wrongful death lawsuit, shortly after nine out of the 10 suits were settled weeks earlier. However, there are still hundreds of injury cases (which were combined into a single case under a Texas statute) that have not been settled and are still on the table.

Most people are of the belief that Taylor Swift can do no wrong, but if there’s one recurring point of criticism from recent years, it’s been her private jet usage and its impact on the environment. Now, Just Stop Oil, a group of climate-focused activists, have decided to leverage this attention: Recently, two group members broke into a private airfield where Swift’s private jet had landed and spray-painted two private jets.

The group wrote (as NME notes), “Jennifer and Cole cut the fence into the private airfield at Stansted where Taylor Swift’s jet is parked, demanding an emergency treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030. We’re living in two worlds: one where billionaires live in luxury, able to fly in private jets away from the other, where unlivable conditions are being imposed on countless millions. Meanwhile, this system that is allowing extreme wealth to be accrued by a few, to the detriment of everyone else, is destroying the conditions necessary to support human life in a rapidly accelerating never-ending ‘cruel summer.’ Billionaires are not untouchable, climate breakdown will affect every single one of us.”

Police said Swift’s jet wasn’t actually at the airfield when the incident occurred, but it had landed there hours earlier. The two protesters were arrested on “suspicion of criminal damage and interference with the use or operation of national infrastructure.”

This comes shortly after Just Stop Oil pulled a similar stunt at Stonehenge.

Given that yesterday (June 19) was Juneteenth, it was a relatively slow news day in the music world. That is, except for one thing: Last night, Kendrick Lamar hosted The Pop Out — Ken & Friends, a special concert event that wasn’t about the Drake feud, but was also totally about the Drake feud. A number of Lamar’s Drake diss tracks made the setlist, most notably “Not Like Us,” which was performed five times in a row to end the show.

Folks online took notice: Drake became the No. 1 trending topic on X (formerly Twitter) and still is as of this post on Thursday morning.

A lot of the reactions were people imagining Drake’s reaction to the show, particularly to the repetition of “Not Like Us,” with tweets comedically imagining Drake feeling anger, frustration, or sadness.

Others just admired the whole situation. As one user put it, “17,000+ people gathered together in one place to call Drake a pedophile with Kendrick Lamar. This level of hate will never be duplicated.” Another noted, “Not Like Us to Drake is how Back To Back was for Meek [crying laughing emoji] Kendrick preformed the song 4 times and the entire arena rapped it word for word all 4 times.”

Check out some more reactions below.