In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
In the “In My Feelings” video, Drake complains about the idea that he has to make an “In My Feelings” video. The whole clip is framed as a bad dream — Drake watching one of his songs catch fire without his input, forced to stand back as all the cultural-phenomenon stuff happens without him. He seems profoundly aggravated about the whole experience, to the point where he’s angrily confused when he meets a music-video production assistant who looks just like the guy who made that song so popular in the first place. It’s such a nightmare for Drake: Another hit? One that wasn’t even part of his plan?
That’s a strategic framing. Drake was obviously happy to have another hit. For way too long, he collected hits like they were Pokémon cards. Shiggy, the internet comedian who did the dance that turned “In My Feelings” into a viral fad, has said that Drake was extremely thankful and gracious about the whole situation. Still, there’s something to the strategic framing. In the streaming era, songs sometimes take off on their own. They become memes, dance challenges, runaway hits. Years-old songs will catch out-of-nowhere TikTok surges and ride the tide of internet infamy. Artists and record labels do their best to manufacture those moments, to turn underperforming singles into social-media cult smashes, and it almost never works out the way that they want. Instead, the people have to pick the songs. In summer 2018, “In My Feelings” was the people’s champ — the Drake song that became a kind of ground-up success, rather than the carefully strategized Drake releases that were also gigantic hits.
“In My Feelings” wasn’t some internet obscurity that was elevated by the efforts of an online army. It was a Drake song in 2018, which means it was always going to be huge. Before it became a viral dance challenge, “In My Feelings” was already a top-10 hit, and its hit status probably propelled the whole dance-challenge wave in the first place. It’s a song very much in the mold of “Nice For What,” the Drake hit that was still dancing in and out of the top spot when “In My Feelings” finally rose to #1. There’s still some charm in the idea that the people could cause a glitch in the matrix and force the world’s biggest star, which is what Drake was at that moment, to alter his plans. But that charm only goes so far, since the song itself isn’t that great, and also since it’s Drake. It’s just never been much fun to root for that guy.
The dominance of “In My Feelings” wasn’t part of the grand design, so there aren’t really any big stories behind the song’s creation. People still tried to come up with some. On “In My Feelings,” Drake talks longingly about being really into a girl who he calls Kiki. Drake presumably puts stuff out there specifically to get that kind of deep-dive reaction going. When he raps about “Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree,” you can be pretty certain that there really is someone named Courtney who worked at the Hooters on Peachtree Road in Atlanta. That girl will hear his line about her, and maybe she’ll feel special for a minute. But millions other people will hear that line, and some of them will find this girl and bother her. Presumably, this all serves some purpose for Drake, but I don’t know what that purpose would be.
In the case of “In My Feelings,” people had fun speculating on who Kiki might be. The original theory was that Kiki was Keshia Chanté, the former 106 & Park host who dated Drake when they were both kids in Toronto. Drake lore says that Chanté was his first love and that he never got over her. Kanye West got very upset over the idea that Kiki was actually Kim Kardashian, his wife at the time. Specifically, he seemed mad that Drake didn’t come right out and clarify that Kiki was not Kim Kardashian. Drake later admitted what some fans already guessed — that Kiki was really K’yanna Barber, a woman who worked as a dancer for the great Oakland rapper Kamaiyah. (Kamaiyah doesn’t have any Hot 100 hits of her own, but she and Drake both guested on YG’s “Why You Always Hatin’?,” which peaked at #62 in 2016.)
In any case, Drake and Barber didn’t have any kind of public long-term relationship, though she did get some level of social-media fame out of it. I guess he was just flirting in song form. I find this kind of detective work to be pretty tedious. When a song becomes as big as “In My Feelings,” the only thing that really matters is whether it connects to anything bigger than the specific state of Drake’s dating life. As in: We might know what this song means to Drake, but what does it mean to you? Do you feel anything when you hear it? If you don’t — if you can’t apply anything from that song to your own life — then it’s not a great pop song. Great pop songs don’t have to be literal reflections of things that happened in the singer’s life. Instead, they have to resonate in some larger way. Personally, I don’t feel much when I hear “In My Feelings.” It doesn’t resonate like that.
“In My Feelings” started off as an instrumental track from Benny Workman, the producer known professionally as TrapMoneyBenny. Benny, a young white guy from Cleveland, got his start making beats for the underground Atlanta rapper Key!, and he went on to produce for people like Gucci Mane, Machine Gun Kelly, and Drake’s buddy 21 Savage. Shortly after Drake’s Scorpion album came out, Benny spoke to The FADER about the track. Benny says that he was signed to the production company owned by James Fauntleroy, the R&B singer and behind-the-scenes figure who’s already been in this column for working on Bruno Mars’ “That’s What I Like.” (Fauntleroy has no Hot 100 hits has lead artist, but he’s featured alongside Jay-Z and Beyoncé on DJ Khaled’s “Sorry Not Sorry,” which peaked at #30 in 2021.) Fauntleroy was in Toronto to work on Drake’s Scorpion album, and he played some of Benny’s beats for Drake. Drake liked the “In My Feelings” track enough to shout Benny out on the song’s intro, and his name sounds pretty cool when Drake sing-raps it. Benny heard his name on the Drake song at the same time that the rest of the world did, and it was a great surprise for him.
TrapMoneyBenny put together the initial beat for “In My Feelings,” and then Drake’s various associates worked it over. Noah “40” Shebib, Drake’s best friend and most frequent collaborator, put his own stuff on “In My Feelings.” So did BlaqNmilD, the New Orleans bounce producer who was responsible for many of the crucial components on Drake’s previous smash “Nice For What.” BlaqNmilD put in a bunch of samples, and those samples are the main reason that “In My Feelings” has 13 credited songwriters. There’s a “Triggerman” sample somewhere in “In My Feelings,” just as there was on “Nice For What.” So the Showboys, the Queens rap duo whose 1985 single “Drag Rap” made up the entire foundation of New Orleans bounce, are credited. So is Drake’s New Orleans mentor Lil Wayne. There’s a bit of Wayne saying “skate and smoke and rap,” from an interlude that he dropped on a 2012 mixtape from DJ Stevie J; that bit actually got retroactively added in after “In My Feelings” first came out. But Wayne’s main contribution is his scratched-up “bring that ass back” chant from “Lollipop,” which means that “In My Feelings” is one of those #1 hits that samples a different #1 hit.
Another “In My Feelings” sample is a deeper pull. The New Orleans bounce artist Magnolia Shorty signed with Cash Money Records in the late ’90s; she was the first woman on the label. Shorty never put out a proper album on Cash Money, and she was killed in a 2010 drive-by shooting in New Orleans. She was 28. A bunch of gang members later went to prison for the murder and the conspiracy surrounding it. “In My Feelings” samples Shorty chanting about having a new boy on her 2010 mixtape track “Smoking Gun.” (Drake used her a cappella version, so he didn’t have to worry about all the other tracks that got sampled on “Smoking Gun.”)
The album version of “In My Feelings” also ends with a bit of dialogue taken from Atlanta, the TV show created by former Number Ones artist Childish Gambino. In the season-two episode “Champagne Papi,” Zazie Beetz’ character Van, the off-and-on girlfriend of Donald Glover’s protagonist, tags along with her girlfriends to a party at Drake’s house. She’d determined to find Drake and to take a picture with him, but it turns out that Drake isn’t even at the party that night. That episode aired just a couple of months before Drake’s Scorpion album came out, and he apparently didn’t know he’d be the episode’s MacGuffin until he saw it. Drake used a sample of Beetz saying that she needs a photo with Drake because her Instagram game is weak as fuck.
But the biggest addition to “In My Feelings” wasn’t any of the samples. It was the inclusion of the City Girls, the Miami duo of JT and Yung Miami. The City Girls made hard, simplistic strip-club rap, and they always depicted sexual politics as a bleak landscape where sex could only ever be transactional. They were really fun; I liked them a lot. The City Girls started in 2017, and they made a viral splash with “Fuck Dat N***a,” the first song that they ever recorded. That track got them signed to the Atlanta label Quality Control, and Drake was apparently impressed. On “In My Feelings,” Drake shouts out both City Girls. (Yung Miami’s real name is Caresha Brownlee, so she’s the Resha that Drake mentions on the hook.)
The City Girls aren’t sampled on “In My Feelings,” and they aren’t credited as featured guests, either. They came in to record original vocals for the track, and then someone — I assume it’s BlaqNmilD — scratched up their verses. In the end, they only get about one line apiece on “In My Feelings,” but Yung Miami’s part — “I show him how that neck work/ Fuck that Netflix and chill, what’s yo’ net net net worth?” — is easily the song’s most exciting moment. The success of “In My Feelings” was a huge boost for the City Girls, but it didn’t make everything easy for them. Before the release of “In My Feelings,” JT was charged with identity theft and sentenced to two years in federal prison. She started her sentence right around the same time that the song came out. On the day that she was released in 2019, JT recorded her song “First Day Out,” and she rapped about what must’ve been a surreal experience: “Went in the same day Drake dropped ‘In My Feelings’/ I was in prison on my bunk, really in my feelings.”
When JT was incarcerated, Yung Miami kept releasing music under the City Girls name. Miami also had some kids with big-name rap producer Southside and made a few notoriously homophobic interview comments, which didn’t help anything. Even with all that, the City Girls had a nice run for themselves, scoring a few hits between 2019 and 2022. The biggest of them, the 2019 singalong earworm “Act Up,” peaked at #26. Their story was the inspiration for Rap Sh!t, an Issa Rae-produced show that had a couple of seasons on HBO. But Rap Sh!t didn’t last, and neither did the City Girls. They broke up somewhat messily last year, and Yung Miami, who was in an open relationship with Diddy for a couple of years, got tied up in the stories about his insane history of sex abuses when those stories came to light. She shouldn’t have to take the blame for anything that Diddy did, but City Girls tracks haven’t hit the same since then.
All of these Drake columns require so much fucking context that the songs themselves can get lost. In this case, I might just be rambling on and on about the context because the song is so insubstantial. “In My Feelings” is a little livelier than many of the endless dirges on Drake’s Scorpion album, but that’s not saying much. The hook, where Drake asks various girls if they love him and they’re ridin’, is memorable enough to get stuck in my head, but I never like it when that happens. He sounds whiny and desperate, as if he can’t function without the validation that he gets from hearing that yes, Kiki loves him. It’s one things to make a hit about neediness, one where people can project their own feelings when they’re at their neediest. This one just sounds like Drake inflicting his own neediness on the rest of the world.
Drake’s singsong verse — there’s only one — works a little better than the hook. Like “Nice For What,” “In My Feelings” is a song of appreciation. This one is a little hornier, though. Drake says that he likes getting head from this girl and that he likes taking her out to buy stuff, which seems like a very Drake way to conduct a relationship: “And when you get to toppin’, I see that you’ve been learnin’/ And when I take you shoppin’, you spend it like you earned it.” But when he sees her yell at her ex, that’s when he decides that she’s really special: “And when you popped off on your ex, he deserved it/ I thought you were the one from the jump; that confirmed it.” He also gets in a line about how this lady is “from the block like you Jenny,” a sly little acknowledgement of the fact that Drake dated the real Jennifer Lopez, someone who’s been in this column a bunch of times, for a minute. Romantic, right?
It’s fine. It’s just what Drake does. Drake is very rarely at his best when he’s in for-the-ladies mode; “Nice For What” is a great little anomaly on that front. On “In My Feelings,” Drake sounds pretty effortless. The hook is labored, but it’s memorable. The verses are casually fluid, and they’ve got some energy. It would be a replacement-level Drake album track if not for the bounce stuff. Even in its first half, “In My Feelings” has whole lot of strut in its drum programming, its “Triggaman” sample buried in the mix but still prominent enough to keep things moving. The breakdown comes in on the chopped-up “bring that ass back” part, and then Drake becomes a mere passenger on his own track. Not coincidentally, that’s when things get a whole lot more fun — the samples chattering back and forth at each other, the upside-down-bucket drums, the sense that something explosive is happening. “In My Feelings” never quite achieves full catharsis, mostly because the watery Rhodes riff never disappears, but it moves far enough in that direction to pick up some steam.
Actual primal New Orleans bounce is so raunchy and reliant on samples that it could never work as legitimate pop music. You’d have to split the royalties up a million ways, and someone would step in and say that you can’t use the Rocky horns or whatever. Bounce is copyright-flouting music for mixtapes and backyard parties. But Drake does have the budget for a lot of those samples, and a track like “In My Feelings” benefits enormously from the fact that he’s willing to salute that music. It’s not a real bounce track; it’s too sedate for that. But it’s fun to hear some of that spirit at work on a big hit song, even if the song itself doesn’t have the anarchic giddiness that would make it all worth it. The difference between real bounce and “In My Feelings” is the same the difference between a Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monster and a CGI one. They’re both monsters, and it’s fun to see monsters in movies. But the older, weirder one has more personality, and that personality comes from its rickety qualities. When a glue-and-rubber construction becomes expensive blockbuster entertainment, it loses something.
When Scorpion first came out, “In My Feelings” registered as a fan-favorite song, even though it arrives 21 tracks into that interminable-ass album. Six songs from Scorpion took up spots in the top 10 the week after that the album arrived, and one of them was “In My Feelings,” at #6. But “In My Feelings” really took off shortly afterward. Internet personality Shiggy posted an Instagram video of himself dancing to “In My Feelings” — bending side to side, doing the heart-hands thing on “do you love me,” twisting an imaginary steering wheel on “are you ridin’.” That dance took on a life of its own, becoming known as the Kiki Challenge, or the #InMyFeelings Challenge. This was a little while after the Mannequin Challenge took Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” to #1, and the same principle applied. When enough people interact with a song online, that song becomes a hit.
Within a few days, so many people were attempting Shiggy’s “In My Feelings” dance. Lots of celebrities posted their versions: Odell Beckham Jr., Kevin Hart, James Harden, former Number Ones artist Ciara and her husband Russell Wilson. Drake’s way-too-young friend Millie Bobby Brown did the dance with one of the other Stranger Things kids. Will Smith posted a video of himself climbing up on a bridge in Budapest to do it. Eventually, Drake posted his own.
Civilians did the “In My Feelings” dance, too. For a lot of them, the challenge took on dangerous new elements. It briefly became popular to do the dance while ghostriding your car — jumping out from behind the wheel when it’s in motion, hitting the moves, and then getting back in. That was widespread enough that the National Transportation Safety Board, one of the many federal agencies that’s presumably getting decimated right now, put out a warning. One guy got hit by an oncoming car while doing the dance, and then he went on Jimmy Kimmel to explain that it was a planned stunt but that the oncoming car went faster than it was supposed to go. (He was OK.) New variations took off, as when a couple of guys in India went viral for doing the dance in a rice paddy, behind two oxen. There was a New York Times story about that one.
The internet was in a slightly less fractured place in 2018, and challenges like the “In My Feelings” dance could become more widespread than I think they would today. The Ice Bucket Challenge happened around the same time, and that phenomenon actually raised a lot of money for ALS research. But the “In My Feelings” dance mostly just raised money for Drake and his label bosses. Drake quickly latched on to the phenomenon, enlisting Karena Evans, director of his “God’s Plan” and “Nice For What” videos, to make a clip for “In My Feelings.” That video came out a few weeks into the song’s long reign at #1. Drake and Evans shot the clip in New Orleans. Before the song starts, Drake, wearing grills in his mouth like his Cash Money forebears, does the bedroom-window pebble-throw to attract Kiki, played by the former VJ LaLa Anthony. Phylicia Rashad, in the role of Kiki’s mom, is pretty funny.
For the most part, the “In My Feelings” video is a New Orleans travelogue, the same way that the “God’s Plan” clip is a Miami travelogue. Lil Wayne isn’t in the clip, but Drake spends a lot of time in front of a Wayne mural. For obvious reasons, JT isn’t there, either. Instead, Yung Miami represents for both City Girls, amidst a small army of twerking women. Big Freedia, the bounce artist sampled on “Nice For What,” puts in a cameo. At the end of the video, there’s a way-too-long comedy sketch where Drake wakes up from his nightmare about the “In My Feelings” viral boom and Shiggy plays the pushy production assistant who won’t leave him alone. Then there’s an end-credits montage of celebrities doing the “In My Feelings” dance. It’s enough to make you miss the days when a music video could just be a music video. I’ll take this opportunity to say that I really hate the heart-hands gesture, in all its permutations. I don’t even know why. It just gets on my nerves. This has probably affected my feelings on both “In My Feelings” and its attendant viral dance. My attitude is: There are better ways to express yourself than by forming emojis with your body. That’s just how I feel.
“In My Feelings” has more sparkle to it than most Drake deep cuts, so I’ll give it credit for that. But its 2018 song-of-the-summer dominance was barely challenged, and the song is way too wispy and forgettable to occupy a role like that. My feelings don’t matter, though, because that’s what happened. On the back of the dance challenge, “In My Feelings” went from meme to actual monster hit, and it didn’t go away for months. The song went platinum eight times over, and it now has more Spotify streams than “Nice For What” but not “God’s Plan.” (All three songs are comfortably in the billions.) The Scorpion LP went seven-times platinum. Billboard named it the year’s biggest album.
Scorpion pulled off the rare-these-days feat of sending three different songs to #1. Two of those songs debuted on top before Drake released the album, but “In My Feelings” rode a groundswell, climbed its way to the top, and stayed there for months. Drake’s too-big-to-fail era was here, and it would keep going for a while, even as he ran on creative fumes. There were no more #1 hits from Scorpion after “In My Feelings,” but before the end of 2018, Drake guested on a chart-topper from another rapper. We’ll see him again soon.
GRADE: 5/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s the Canadian singer-songwriter Lights singing a wispy acoustic version of “In My Feelings,” rap verses and samples and all:
THE 10S: Another song that gets a lot out of the expression “in my feelings” is “Boo’d Up,” a playfully delirious Mustard-produced work of love-song onomatopoeia from the British R&B singer Ella Mai. That one peaked at #5 behind “In My Feelings.” It just won’t stop; it’s a 10.
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Reader! Do you love me? Are you buying?
