“Back to Back” is the second of Drake’s responses to Meek Mill following his allegations of ghostwriting in July 2015, via a now-deleted tweet:

The title refers to the second diss track in a week (it came just four days after Drake dissed Meek Mill on “Charged Up”), as well as The Toronto Blue Jays winning back to back championships.

True to his word, Drake performed the song live at OVO Fest accompanied by fan-made memes that dissed Meek Mill, a move taken straight from the Jay Z playbook. This is widely considered as the point where Drake won the beef.

The song cover shows Joe Carter, of Drake’s hometown team the Toronto Blue Jays, after he hit the winning home run from the 1993 World Series against Meek’s hometown team, the Philadelphia Phillies. The Blue Jays won the year before in 1992, earning “back to back” titles. Carter went to twitter to personally thank Drake for using his picture as cover art.

The release date of this track was no mistake, as the Phillies and Blue Jays faced off that same night (July 29th, 2015) on Sportsnet. Poetically, the Blue Jays came out on top, 8-2.

After Meek’s response track “Wanna Know” was released, Drake prepared a third diss track entitled “3Peat”, and played it at his OVOFest headlining show. However, the diss was never released in full.

“Back To Back” was nominated in the “Best Rap Performance” category at the 2016 Grammy Awards, the first diss track to do so.

In an interview on October 28, 2016, Meek Mill finally revealed what he thought about the track, stating:

I ain’t think it was no shit that people was gonna be like, ‘you got killed.’ I thought it was hot. Like when we shoot at niggas, you gotta shoot a nigga through the heart. When you wake up in the mirror, you looking in the mirror, you hearing what the nigga told you, some shit about yourself that you can’t even deal with. That’s how we battle where we come from.