Drake ingeniously tapped into what is quite possibly a brand new market for the global rap star Wednesday night by popping up on Twitch to play Fortnite.
The Drake x Ninja stream broke a record by landing more than 600,000 concurrent viewers at its peak. To hear Post Malone tell it, however, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is "still better" than Fortnite.
At any rate, one element of Drake's Twitch domination that inspired a wave of question marks was his choice of username: TheBoyDuddus.
![duddus](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 135 76"%3E%3C/svg%3E)
As fans on Reddit and Twitter started pointing out (after similar KTT ponderings months ago) amidst the 6 God Twitch mania, there's a good chance—if you subtract a D, anyway—that the name is a reference to Jamaican drug lord Christopher "Dudus" Coke. Coke was hit with a 23-year prison sentence back in 2012 after pleading guilty to trafficking weed and cocaine to the States. Prior to his arrest in 2010, Coke was considered one of the "most dangerous" drug traffickers on the planet.
![Drake.](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 203 115"%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Coke escaped legal consequences for years, according to the Guardian, thanks to alleged protection from Jamaican political leaders. He touted his history of "charitable deeds and social services" in West Kingston in a letter to the court prior to his 2012 sentencing, but it's worth noting that he was also accused by federal prosecutors of doing things like ordering a man he believed had stolen money from him to be restrained so he could "personally" kill him using a chainsaw. Coke's legal team, per a 2011 New Yorker piece, denied the chainsaw allegation.
Pengz referenced Coke in his TwoTwo-featuring 2017 single "Griselda Blanco," which we know for a fact Drake enjoyed:
Of course, Drake hasn't commented on any of this and likely never will. Given his affinity for Jamaican culture, however, it's a reasonable explanation for TheBoyDuddus.