Drake, Matt Rife and the Impulse To Turn on Your Fanbase For Male Recognition

By Alberto Cox Délano | Celebrity | December 12, 2023 |

By Alberto Cox Délano | Celebrity | December 12, 2023 |

Everything I know about Matt Rife has been against my will. As someone who loves stand-up comedy and tries to keep up with new faces (or in Rife’s case, second faces BOOM), there’s no way I would’ve given a damn about Matt Rife because I don’t think there was much to his comedy, even without the “controversy”. Just another white, US suburban boy making comedy from their very local experiences, to paraphrase Bong Joon-Ho.

Just to recap, Matt Rife is a 28-year-old comedian who got his start on various MTV shows but really gained traction as videos of his sets and audience interactions went viral on TikTok, mostly because the guy is hot. And not hot for the standards of male comedians, but proper hot. He accumulated a very large, mostly female, mostly Gen Z fandom, and then blew it all up to hell as he opened his first Netflix special with a basic, edgy-for-suburban-teens joke about domestic violence, and further “women be dumb” bits. He dug deeper into his alt-right heel turn by going on Jordan Peterson’s podcast to whine, and most recently got called out by Marc Maron and, underhandedly, by Anthony Jeselnik. More recently, he got into a fight with a six-year-old and lost.

He turned on the audience that made him famous enough to get a Netflix special just because he couldn’t deal with the fact that it was made up of girls and young women. For example, just two months ago, he was featured in a Cosmopolitan video where he roasts dating app profiles, currently standing at a million views, and no, I’m not going to link to it. That’s when I started catching up with this whole situation because I simply couldn’t fathom it. As a cishet man myself, why in the name of fuck would I resent having a fanbase made up of women?

But as I checked videos dissecting this about-face, I realized something: Matt Rife is a very stupid boy. As in, his decision to give his fans the middle finger is a product of the fact that he is a fucking idiot. A true sign of a great comedian is how good they are as conversationalists, the wit they can bring to an unscripted interaction. Matt Rife, when interviewed on podcasts, speaks like your average meathead but without any himbo charm. He has all the depth of somebody who considers Dane Cook and David Spade as inspirations. He is … a flat person.

He is obviously, so obviously, an all-American hot guy who had a modicum of charisma, enough to convince himself that he could make it as an entertainer, and well, he wasn’t wrong. But apparently, resentment began to grow on how he made his fame, insisting that he didn’t “pander his career to women” and that he made comedy “for the boys”… even though his website’s background photo is of him shirtless, while on stage he pulls every cheesy “I’m so cute” facial expression. The videos of his crowd work, the ones that made him popular, are basically just a hot guy with a bit of game flirting. But hey, if that’s how he wanted to hack a career, that would be fine. But that wouldn’t grant him much respect from the comic community. Not without fashioning his craft into something more interesting, less hacky.

Nevertheless, he would’ve done fine, but instead, he decided to chase after the respect of the manosphere. He switched hacks, from the relatively harmless one of being the “hot guy in comedy” to just being another failed provocateur pandering to the US’s far-right. A very stupid move if you consider that A) the field for edgy, hacky right-wing comedians is saturated, and B) Alt-right guys don’t really like pretty boys. At all. Not just the incels. Consider how the male lineup of Fox News looks compared to the women. The alt-right is not a place for conventionally attractive men.

Why, why would an ostensibly straight man resent having a fandom of millions of women? Am I, a no-life normie, missing something here? I understand why he would want the respect and appreciation of his colleagues and other men in the industry. But to the point of burning bridges with your customer base?

I’m thinking of Justin Bieber, someone with a very similar fanbase, who clearly was desperate to gain the respect of other men during his shithead phase. But he never, ever denounced his mostly female fandom. One of his biggest songs ever is literally an apology to his fans (a shitty one tho). Or consider Ed Sheeran, who, unlike Bieber, as a folk-ish singer-songwriter, has much more at stake when it comes to gaining the respect of his genre peers. I doubt Shane MacGowan, Van Morrison, or Bob Dylan would care much for his lyrics. But he seems happy enough being both a normie dad and the most improbable biggest name in music of the 2010s. Both Sheeran and Bieber are about the same age as Rife (late Millennials!), and both got their breakouts over a decade ago, much younger and much more vulnerable. It took a toll on them; Bieber has barely recovered from exposure and everything he had to be for his audience.

Why is Rife, then, the one reacting to his newfound fame like a sullen teenager?

He reminds me of the other biggest name in music of the 2010s, also a Millennial (an elder one this time), who also built his popularity on a mostly female following and who also has never enjoyed much respect from his peers: Drake. Like Rife, he was also considered bland and a bit of a pretty boy. A rapper for girls, a diss that weighs even more heavily in the rap game than in the comedy world. Still, Drake won the long game and became too big to be dismissed out of hand, and yet he has never been able to get over the fact that he never got full respect from the Rap Game.

YouTuber F.D. Signifier has made one feature-length video essay and several shorter takes on Drake’s figure and (nefarious) influence on hip-hop as an industry. But if there’s one you should watch is the latest, in which he breaks down how Drake has never been able to overcome that hurt and resentment of not being respected, of being deemed soft and “for women”. To paraphrase him, Drake is the embodiment of the dork’s ultimate fantasy: Glow up and become hugely successful.

But that dork fantasy always carries the germ of incel vindictiveness. It’s a dream in which you finally get the respect you feel entitled to, in which your rivals kneel before you, be they other men or women you desire. Whenever a male dork hasn’t done the work to unlearn or repurpose that original anger, they will use whatever success they achieve to fan the flames of their resentment. In Drake’s case, it resulted in one mediocre, overstuffed album after another where he whinges about not getting respect, shits on Black women (and Megan Thee Stallion in particular) and “the hoes after my money”, slides into the DMs of music critics to insult them and makes a whole deal about making a necklace out of diamond rings for women he didn’t propose to.

It’s the put-down teenager and young adult throwing tantrums in the body of a 37-year-old multimillionaire who’s clearly had some work done. Just like Matt Rife, Drake’s just a lucky idiot who is willing to throw away any goodwill for a modicum of male respect. Males that never even put money into your bank account (with one exception in Drake’s case, we’ll get to that), but more importantly, gaining approval from those males would never turn you into a better artist. Drake was always at his best as the emotional guy, but one that was still attached to nice guy misogyny. Had he worked on himself, on craft and mental health, he could’ve found a way to be a better rapper being his original, dorky self. At least he was smart enough to wait a whole decade before obliterating his public image by going down a misogynistic rabbit hole. He’s now too big to fully alienate his fanbase.

I still cannot figure out what is so important about respect from other dudes when you already have a following of women. Am I too straight? Am I still thinking as a teenager? Mostly for worse, but also for better, a good deal of our development as cishet men orbits around gaining the attention of girls and then women… in that order. What has convinced so many of us that male approval is that important, even to the detriment of success with women, the one thing that heteronormativity prizes the most?

The answer is, obviously, patriarchy. It’s both hilarious and disheartening to see it eat its own tail.

There is one more thing. Psychologists insist that we should never diagnose strangers, but sometimes a profile stares right back at you, in fully naked obviousness. Both Drake and Matt Rife had to contend with absent or estranged fathers. In Rife’s case, tragically, his father took his own life when he was a baby. It’s never an excuse, of course. But as the son of an absent father myself, the natural thing for me has been to distrust other men. Why is it the opposite for so many of my fellow fatherless guys?

Alberto Cox implores Anthony Jeselnik to upload his newest, widely praised comedy special to Netflix as soon as possible. We need you, baby.