Drake Throws Shade At Rolling Stone and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Wait, What?

An angry Drake is a rare thing, like a Honduran Emerald hummingbird perched atop a tree in the far reaches of the jungle. Other than his rap catalog, where he often calls out a laundry list of haters, the clean-cut Toronto rapper has behaved like every polite Canadian boy should: Avoiding conflict, praising his rivals, and practicing a kind of humility that's rare in the rap game.

That's why today's news that Drake is furious with Rolling Stone for promising him a cover and then giving it to Philip Seymour Hoffman at the last second is so surprising. Taking a page out of The Book of Kanye, the 27-year-old rapper unleashed his first ever Twitter tirade, tweeting that he's "disgusted" with the magazine, before ultimately paying his respect to Philip Seymour Hoffman. Perhaps realizing how petulant he sounded, Drake has since deleted his controversial tweets. The only tweet left is one in which he promises that he's "done doing interviews for magazines."

For a rapper who's made a career of being self-aware, it was very uncharacteristic of him to publicly bemoan losing some press to a beloved actor who died tragically, especially when that press is essentially meaningless.

Here's the thing: Drake has nothing to promote at the moment. His most recent album was released last year and topped charts. His sellout tour is over. He absolutely slayed SNL, and even his beloved Toronto Raptors are winning games. Most artists depend on magazine covers to help sell us on something, but Drake's already sold us. Would a Rolling Stone cover make Drake more famous? Would it help sell more records? Probably not, which is what makes today's outburst so puzzling.

Maybe Drake is just tired of his persona as hip-hop's resident nice guy. The Rolling Stone article, which can be read in its entirety here, is peppered with instances of Drake throwing shade at his fellow rappers, including Macklemore, whose post-Grammy text message to Kendrick he called "whack as f*ck". There was a even a slight dig at Drake BFF Kanye West, which the rapper then took to Twitter to deny.

The silver lining here is that Drake strikes us as the kind of guy who will be tortured by all this negative press, and thus learn from his mistake. But since he's never doing another magazine interview again, we'll just have to wait until his next album to find out. (Rolling Stone)