Three days and $20m: How Drake and Meek Mill made history with ‘Going Bad’
Drake and Meek Mill were once embroiled in a beef but managed to put their past issues aside in order to make not only a hit but an eight-figure profit.
The Toronto and Philadelphia rappers collaborated in 2012 on a song titled ‘Amen’ that appeared on Meek’s debut album Dreams and Nightmares. The collaboration peaked at number 57 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number five on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and was enough for them to collaborate once again on ‘R.I.CO.’ in 2015, but their relationship quickly turned sour after Meek accused Drake of using a ghostwriter.
Drake fired back at Meek’s claims by releasing the diss tracks ‘Charged Up’ and Back to Back’. Meek responded with ‘Wanna Know’, which led to Drake teasing another diss called ‘3Peat’ at OVO Fest, but the track never officially surfaced.
The beef simmered for a few years with subliminal shots taken by Drake on ‘Summer Sixteen’ and Meek on ‘War Pain’, but the pair reunited in September 2018 when Drizzy brought Meek to the stage to perform his iconic ‘Dreams and Nightmares’ intro.
With the problems behind them, Drake and Meek came together once again in December 2018 for a song titled ‘Going Bad’, which featured on Meek’s Championships album. The track served as the second single from the album and was a chart success, peaking at number six on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 13 on the UK Singles Chart.
Meek Mill took to X (formerly known as Twitter) in 2022 to reveal some fascinating details about the song, claiming it took just three days to record and generated $20million from a $20,000 budget.
“Don’t give me a plaque, give me the financial paper of how much the song I recorded for 20k made 20million … not an award,” he wrote whilst complaining about the lack of money he’s personally received from the track. “I’m from the trenches, I don’t want that shit, I want an estate… I want my whole family tree to beat the ghetto!”
He continued, “I asked Drake to do that song three days b4 my album came out, ‘I think he did for free for me.’ We cooked it up…. How tf do I not know how much I made off a song that made that much … they gave me a plaque. big mental trickery!”
Following their beef, Meek admitted he made a bad decision in targeting Drake in the first place, explaining to Charlamagne Tha God, “If you ask me why I came at Drake, I don’t even fucking really, really know. I just ain’t really know when I look back. I’m just like, ‘Fuck I wanna do something like that [for]?’… I’m making very bad decisions and not knowing I’m making these bad decisions. When I wasn’t high, and I went back on YouTube and checked my file, [I was like] I don’t do shit like that.”
Drake also addressed the situation whilst sitting down with Rap Radar, giving Meek credit and revealing how important it was to put things behind them.
“I don’t like to glorify the situation or talk about it too much,” he said. “Meek’s really about that. I know, obviously, he’s made a change in his life, but I’ll be the first to tell you that Meek’s that guy for real. I wasn’t beefing with no punk. For us to be able to turn that around, [it] was a big thing. I think we both felt an obligation because we know how far it was going and almost went.”