Drake in Dada / Drake Lean

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About

Drake Wearing Dada refers to a photoshop meme based on a photograph of the Canadian rapper and entertainer Drake^[1] taken during the shoot of his upcoming music video "No New Friends" in May 2013. The photograph quickly drew attention from his fans and hip hop music communities alike, mainly for the rapper's wardrobe choice of Damani Dada, an athletic apparel and shoes company that was once popular among hip hop musicians in the 1990s, as well as his leaning posture

Origin

On May 15th, 2013, several behind-the-scene photographs from Drake's music video shoot for “No New Friends"^[3] were leaked to a number of music blogs,^[2] including one that showed the entertainer in a leaning pose while dressed in a Dada short suit (shown below, left). Many fans immediately took to Twitter^[4] and rap message boards to point out his throwback fashion style. That same day, a forum thread encouraging people to remix Drake's photo surfaced on the hip hop message board The Coli^[5], leading to several pages of discussion about the rapper's outfit as well as photoshopped images (shown below, right).

Spread

On May 18th, another photoshop thread was launched on Boxden’s hip hop forum^[6], resulting in 23 pages of replies within 48 hours. On May 19th, additional threads were posted on Hip Hop Stan^[7] and Kanye To The^[8], each yielding dozens of contributions in photoshopped images. The same day, the momentum behind the photoshop meme continued to snowball on Twitter^[9], where the phrase “Drake photoshop” was mentioned more than 20,000 times according to Topsy Analytics.^[10]

On May 20th, notable examples from the threads were featured on internet culture and hip hop news blogs, such as Rolling Out^[11], The Source^[12], Uproxx^[13], MTV RapFix^[14] and All Hip Hop^[15] among others. Also on the 20th, Drake responded to the frenzy by sharing a photoshopped instance from The Coli thread via Instagram,^[16] (shown below), where it gained more than 135,000 likes and 5,600 comments within seven hours.