Artist to Drake: You forgot to tag me with your cell phone
Dave Valeza, the illustrator behind Drake's Adele/Hotline Bling Instagram post, speaks out
If you follow Drake on Instagram, and more than 16 million of us do, you've seen the latest post from Toronto's very own @champagnepapi. It's an illustration: Drake's "Hotline Bling" meets Adele's "Hello" in a perfectly of-the-moment pairing.
They're two megahits, two break-up ballads, two songs about... telephones. And the drawing is even circulating in today's music gossip. Adele wants to do an official remix of "Hotline Bling," and according to Billboard the post is proof-enough that Drake could be her latest Canadian collaborator.
But there's something missing from the picture. Los Angeles artist Dave Valeza noticed it as soon as one of his friends tipped him off to the post.
Drake forgot to tag the guy who actually made it.
Valeza is an illustrator, and his 2011 graphic novel, An Elegy for Amelia Johnson, was one of USA Today's Best Graphic Novels of that year. He created the Drake/Adele picture, and first posted it online last month.
"When both songs came out I thought, 'What if Drake and Adele are playing a long game of phone tag, and it's only exacerbating their assumptions of one another?' he told CBC Arts.
Sunday, after seeing Drake's Instagram, Valeza sounded off on Twitter, saying he felt "incredibly sad" to see his work used without attribution.
"Someone famous posting my art without credit! Wish I could say I'm surprised that this keeps happening to artists," Valeza tweeted Sunday.
"I feel incredibly sad but I refuse to feel defeated," he continued after sharing a comparison between Drake's post, which appears to crop out Valeza's signature, and the version he tweeted October 26.
Valeza's October posts of his illustration received a sizable response: 685 retweets, 308 Instagram likes, more than 72,000 notes on Tumblr — and, apparently, enough reach to catch the attention of a pop superstar. Drake's one Instagram post? It has 406,000 likes as of writing.
"I wanted to elaborate on how this makes me feel, but the facts seen here seem enough for now," Valeza tweeted. "Spread the word!"
In turn, various users have come to Valeza's support on Instagram, asking that Drake credit the artist by tagging him in the image.
So what next? Should Drake take a tip from Adele — tell him he's sorry for everything that he's done?
Valeza tells CBC Arts he only wants one thing to come out of the situation.
"There are no hard feelings, I just want credit," he says.
As of writing, his handle has yet to be tagged by Team Drake. Find more of Valeza's illustrations on his blog.