Rocky spends three minutes proving he’s unbothered by someone he definitely thinks about. That’s the tell.
Winners don’t typically dedicate album tracks to explaining why they’ve already won, yet here’s Flacko, eight years deep into fatherhood with the woman Drake publicly pined for, still working out whether he actually took the W or just inherited it.
The production skeleton comes from Icytwat and Kelvin Krash, two producers who’ve spent years perfecting this specific strain of skeletal menace.
They build the track around a two-bar loop that never quite resolves, this cyclical vocal sample chopped into “ready made” fragments that feel like Rocky’s trying to hypnotise himself into believing his own mythology.
The hi-hats are all stutter and hesitation, programmed in triplet patterns that give the whole thing this lurching, off-balance quality.
Then Danny Elfman arrives with these unsettling string swells that belong in a Tim Burton film, layering Gothic orchestration over trap percussion in a way that sounds expensive but feels oddly empty.
The 808s hit hard but the kick pattern is sparse, leaving all this negative space where you’d expect the track to knock.
It looms rather than bangs. Boss music for a fight Rocky insists is already over.
“First you stole my flow, so I stole yo’ bitch” is the kind of bar that sounds devastating until you remember Rocky’s entire early aesthetic came from SpaceGhostPurrp’s Houston tape collection.
There’s something almost funny about a bloke whose breakthrough sound was nicked from someone else’s production accusing anyone of theft. But that’s not even the issue.
The issue is that line treats Rihanna like a trophy in a competition she never signed up for, which accidentally reveals what this whole posture is actually about: Rocky needs Drake to still care.
The “BBL” jab and the “sensitive” digs feel imported from Kendrick’s war, borrowed ammunition for a separate beef.
Rocky’s leaning into the viral language of someone else’s victory because his own arsenal’s been the same since 2015: “I hit it first.”
That’s the foundational logic here, the only card he’s ever really played, and he plays it again with the kind of insistence that makes you wonder who he’s trying to convince.
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When the beat drops out for the third verse and those choir vocals come in, panned hard left and right with heavy reverb, it should feel triumphant.
Instead it just sounds like Rocky hired a gospel choir to cosign his coping mechanism.
There’s a moment in the third verse where Rocky pivots to domesticity. “Now I’m a father, my bitch badder than my toddler / My baby mama Rihanna, so we unbothered.”
It’s meant to sound triumphant, but it lands closer to defensive. The syntax is all wrong.
“So we unbothered” is exactly what someone who’s bothered says. It’s the verbal equivalent of posting “living my best life” captions while checking your ex’s story. If you’re genuinely unbothered, the song doesn’t exist.
The whole “we in the building, not just some tenants” angle about ownership versus Drake’s major label deal is the closest Rocky gets to saying something substantive, but even that’s undermined by the fact he’s still renting headspace to someone he claims to have surpassed.
The megaphone vocal effects that come in periodically, distorted and filtered through what sounds like a bullhorn preset, are meant to evoke militancy but instead just make him sound like he’s shouting from a distance, trying to be heard over something louder.
What’s revealing is the response. RGM gave this track 4 out of 5, calling it confident and sharp, which tells you how effectively Rocky deployed the technical elements.
The production is immaculate, the flows are varied, the song works on a pure craft level.
But scan the Reddit threads and YouTube comments and what you’ll find is thousands of people debating whether the BBL line is about Drake, whether “stole my flow” refers to Travis Scott, whether Rocky’s punching up or down.
Nobody’s talking about what the song actually sounds like because Rocky built a record that directs all attention toward the grievance rather than the music. That’s a choice.
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And it’s a choice that reveals the track’s actual function: not as a diss record that stands on its own bars, but as conversation fodder, engagement bait, a way to stay relevant in a narrative Rocky didn’t start and can’t finish.
Rocky ends the track with this spoken-word outro, his voice unprocessed and pushed to the front of the mix, talking about not owing anyone explanations.
“I’m just here to tell you stories,” he says, which might be the most honest line on the record. Rocky’s building a narrative where he’s the unbothered king with the perfect family and the stolen girl and the superior style, and if he says it enough times over expensive enough production, maybe it becomes true.
But the thing about mythology is it requires an audience that believes it.
And when you’re still cutting promos about a fight you claim to have finished, when you’re dedicating album real estate to someone you insist doesn’t matter, when your producers give you a beat this cold and skeletal and you fill it with this much performance of nonchalance, you’ve already told everyone what they need to know.
Drake’s not living rent-free in Rocky’s head. He’s got a lease. And Rocky keeps renewing it, one expensive-sounding track at a time, hoping the production value will distract from the fact that he’s been having the same argument with himself since 2015.
The beat might be hard. The flows might be technically proficient. The choir might sound expensive.
But at the end of three minutes, you’re left with a song that works harder to convince you it doesn’t care than it does to make you feel anything at all.
That’s the real tell. Not the bars, not the production, not the subliminals.
It’s that Rocky made a record about being over something and the only proof he’s not is that the record exists.