The 2020s File Feature
What Would Pluto Do
What Would Pluto Do — Drake Drops Into the Murky Cosmos of For All the DogsBy the autumn of 2023, Drake occupied a peculiar position in the culture: simultan…
01 The Story
What Would Pluto Do — Drake Drops Into the Murky Cosmos of For All the Dogs
By the autumn of 2023, Drake occupied a peculiar position in the culture: simultaneously the most streamed artist in the world and the artist most relentlessly scrutinized for it. Every album became an event, every track a referendum. When For All the Dogs dropped in October of that year, fans and critics lined up to take their measure. What Would Pluto Do was one of dozens of songs fighting for attention in that first avalanche, and it punched through quickly enough to land on the Hot 100.
For All the Dogs and the Weight of Expectation
By 2023 Drake had released enough music to have phases, chapters, even entire eras reappraised. For All the Dogs leaned into a more vulnerable, introspective mode than some of his more confrontational earlier work, and the timing was not accidental. The title itself nodded to a particular kind of loyalty: to friends, to the streets, to the people who were there before the private jets and the sold-out arenas. What Would Pluto Do carries that energy in concentrated form, its production wrapping a woozy, searching quality around lyrics that circle questions of status, loyalty, and the peculiar isolation that enormous fame can produce in a person who grew up in ordinary circumstances.
A Chart Entry Built on Launch Week Energy
Album-release-week chart floods had become something of a science by the mid-2020s, with streaming numbers on day one capable of sending dozens of tracks simultaneously onto the Hot 100. What Would Pluto Do debuted at number 18 on October 21, 2023, a strong debut-week position that reflected both Drake's streaming muscle and genuine fan enthusiasm for the track specifically. Over the following two weeks it settled back to 66 and then 81 before exiting, completing three weeks on the Hot 100. The arc from 18 to 81 is not a collapse; it is the normal lifespan of an album cut in the streaming era.
The Pluto Metaphor and What It Carries
The title invites a question worth sitting with. Pluto, stripped of full planetary status by astronomers in 2006, became an unlikely cultural symbol for demotion, for the way institutions reclassify things they once celebrated without the thing itself having changed at all. Whether or not that layer of meaning was fully intentional, the song's mood fits the metaphor remarkably well: it orbits further from the sun than most, cold and slow, doing its own thing regardless of what the center decides. For an artist navigating the gap between commercial peak and critical reassessment, the question of what Pluto would do has a certain pointed resonance.
Drake's Streaming Empire in 2023
The numbers around Drake's 2023 output were staggering by any measure. For All the Dogs broke streaming records on its opening weekend, and the sheer volume of material meant that even tracks with approximately 7 million YouTube views were considered mid-tier performers within the larger project. That context matters considerably: a song that would be a career-defining hit for most artists became, within Drake's specific commercial ecosystem, a deep cut with a devoted following rather than a flagship. The Hot 100 placement reflects both his extraordinary reach and the particular economics of how major album releases land in the streaming age.
A Moment in a Long Career
Catalog artists and newer arrivals have always competed for chart real estate, but by the 2020s the landscape had shifted so dramatically that an album could colonize the entire chart for a week and vanish just as fast. What Would Pluto Do captures a particular Drake mood: reflective, a little melancholy, still very much aware of the scoreboard but less interested in the score than usual. As a document of where he was emotionally in late 2023, it rewards close listening from anyone who has wondered what success is actually supposed to feel like from the inside.
Queue it up on a late night, let the production breathe, and see where the questions take you.
“What Would Pluto Do” — Drake's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
What Would Pluto Do — The Meaning Behind Drake's Cold-Orbit Reflection
Somewhere in the outer reaches of the solar system, Pluto keeps moving at its own pace, unbothered by reclassifications and institutional debates about what counts as a planet. What Would Pluto Do borrows that image and applies it to a set of questions that have preoccupied Drake for much of his career: what do you owe the people you came up with, and how do you navigate loyalty when everything else around you has changed so completely that the original map no longer applies?
Fame, Distance, and the People You Leave Behind
One of the recurring tensions in Drake's catalog involves the gap between the world he now inhabits and the world he came from. The larger the career gets, the wider that gap becomes, and the more fraught the question of authenticity. This song circles that tension without resolving it, which is part of its appeal. The narrator neither celebrates his distance from ordinary life nor pretends it does not exist. He sits in the ambiguity, and there is an honesty in that position that listeners found both compelling and unusually candid from someone at his level of celebrity.
The Metaphor of Demotion
Pluto's 2006 reclassification from planet to dwarf planet lodged itself in the collective imagination partly because it felt arbitrary: a decision by committee about a celestial body that had not changed at all, only the categories around it had shifted. The song uses that cultural memory to explore what happens when external systems redefine you regardless of what you have actually done or become. Commercial success can coexist with critical demotion; popularity is not the same as respect. For an artist who has experienced both the pinnacle of mainstream approval and sustained critical skepticism, the metaphor carries real weight.
Loyalty as the Song's Central Value
The imagery in the lyrics keeps returning to a simple question: who shows up when the circumstances change? The song is less interested in bravado than in a kind of tired, clear-eyed accounting of relationships under pressure. Loyalty is valued not for its romantic associations but because it is the one currency that does not inflate. Friends who were there before the fame represent a specific kind of reliability that money and chart positions cannot replicate, and the song knows this with a certainty that feels earned rather than performed.
Why It Resonated
Listeners who responded most strongly to What Would Pluto Do often pointed to its mood as much as its specific content. In an era when Drake's music had sometimes leaned toward maximalism and competitive displays of success, this felt more interior, more candid about the costs of the life rather than the glories. The production's slow, floating quality matched the lyrical introspection precisely, creating something that rewarded headphone listening more than club playback. That intimacy, whatever specific questions it was raising, felt genuine in a way that his more defensive or boastful material sometimes did not. The songs that linger are usually the ones that do not have clean answers.
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