A few stray thoughts on Drake
Revisiting and updating an essay from 2013 because he’s in the news again.
The majority of this essay was written on September 15, 2013. It’s been updated to reflect the small number of things that have changed in that time, but it’s substantially the same piece I published eight years ago. The particular thing that prompted me to post it here was that a friend of mine in one of the rap-nerd fora in which I participate, my man Rasaq (not his real name), prompted a discussion about Drake in which he defended him and said he’s a fan, which moved me to make my thoughts on the guy public, besides which a new Drake album, his seventh major project and sixth official album, is on its way and will be released in late 2021 or early 2022. So here we go!
Eight years after it dropped, I still hold that “Hold On We're Going Home” is by some considerable margin the best thing Drake has ever done, and I seem to be listening to it four or five times a day lately, so it has me thinking a lot about the guy and why his music seems to inspire so many conflicting feelings in people, such that he generates a wealth of varying reactions, from people who think he's the outright worst thing that ever happened to hip-hop to those who think he shares the “king of rap right this second” title with Kendrick Lamar. It's at once super-logical and super-weird to have him at the top right now, and all the moreso because he has stayed at or near the top for so long – approximately 12 years as of 2021, if I have my math right.
It’s logical that he’s at the top, because his music is so smooth and sleek that it felt to me when I first heard it like a gentrification soundtrack, like this canny kid from what was formerly known as the Dot (which, let's be real y’all, we have our rough hoods and it's hard and I would never dream of demeaning or denying the realities of systemic injustice here, but there are things about this city that would probably feel to folks in the Pink Houses or Cabrini Green or Bankhead or the 5th Ward like an alternate universe) was this mocha latté frappucino poster boy for the “post-racial age of Obama” everyone set up false hopes for. More than anyone other than maybe Kanye, he sets the tone for the closest thing to a default sound that rap has right now.
But at one and the same time, it’s illogical that he’s succeeding, too... for almost all the same reasons. As my friend Hemamset Angaza, an accomplished filmmaker and erstwhile rapper from Brooklyn, astutely points out, his stuff doesn't fit in comfortably with any of the previous “Golden Eras” at all. So for a genre and a culture that's obsessively self-referential (and reverential) and addicted to nostalgia like a sickness, he sets a lot of people's teeth on edge, because what he does is mostly (not entirely) new in the grand scheme of things, and he has moments that are so heart-sinkingly corny (or just kinda foppish, in a genre that has such a long and complicated relationship to masculinity and machismo) that of course a cottage industry of (mostly hilarious, I admit) “kitten whisperer” and “human throw pillow” insults sprang up, because how could it not?
And the weird thing is, Drake's reactions to being the new kid on the block with a different story than everyone else and a crossover appeal that scares some people to death (more Obama!) have either been super-intelligent and clever... or really really really really not that. I mean, how does this of all human beings make a song called “Started From The Bottom”? Does he not realize how callow and foolish that makes him look, that his concept of “the bottom” encompasses himself, growing up middle or upper-middle class in Forest Hill? But of course in convinced those are the reactions he wants – that he knows better, but he pulls infuriating shit like that, knowing it'll keep us talking. I think the same is true with his songs about women, the way he sounds like he a) sincerely loves most of them but also b) wants to possess or control them, fancies himself capable of analyzing their situations and being the guy who, for better and worse, saves them and sets their agenda for them. Or at least is indispensable to them. Even the one I know of that is ostensibly about them and not him, “Make Me Proud”, still kinda centres him. Don't get me wrong, I sometimes wish I could talk like that in songs if it'd get as many sexy women dancing to my songs as his, and I'm not saying I'm this perfect stainless guy incapable of making misogynistic mistakes (may God protect me from them), besides which I have female friends to whom his music is an essential part of their daily lives (and my sister, who is notably not physically or sexually attracted to him, is ride-or-die down for him too), but it's just... weird. I haven't heard all his stuff, so I can't speak on everything, and this isn't meant as a thoroughly considered seminar or anything, but just... something's up with that.
And there's so much else, so many other details to set people off. There's his thoughtless and offensive comment about being the first to successfully combine singing and rap, when that legacy stretches all the way back to the Crash Crew. There's the sincere love for the underground that led him to rock with Phonte and Elzhi back when, right next to the tone-deafness that allowed him to make a song about pussy called “Wu-Tang Forever”. There's the time when a key member of his team, Boi 1-da, insulted somebody who dissed him on Twitter by saying “You'll prolly be working in a factory your whole life”, or somesuch – not a great look for an artist dogged by allegations of clueless class-privilege. There's the double-edged-sword carpetbagging of his hopping on trends to shout out regional legends like Mac Dre and DJ Screw – I've done similar things, and at least he's a big Z-Ro fan, which can only be a good thing (there are problems with Z-Ro the person, but Z-Ro the rapper and singer is one of the best rap artists ever, full stop, and I salute Drake for recognizing that), but it still comes across as calculated. There's the fact that he, who as a matter of public record had more help getting into the game than anyone in recent memory, made a song called “All Me” to explicitly deny just that. There’s the bizarre arrogance that led him to take almost sole credit for the Toronto Raptors’ 2019 NBA championship victory, alongside what seems like a very ambivalent relationship to this city, and the fact that some of our OGs, like Fresh Kils, Mindbender, and Theo 3, seem to love and respect him while others claim that they barely ever met him, that he never properly paid his dues here. There was the strange behaviour during his beef with Meek Mill, which he won with such colossal decisiveness and aplomb that I’m still very impressed he pulled it off, but during the course of which he accused Meek, who has always made a larger quantity and higher quality of thoughtful songs than Drake has and who has a more genuine connection to “the streets”, as it were, than Drake does, of ignoring police brutality, when Drake himself has barely ever lifted a finger for social justice – the hypocrisy was galling. There was the fact that he claimed he had secret information about Pusha T that would destroy the latter’s career during their briefly hair-raising beef, which turned out to be an elaborate pump fake so Drake could promote an inconsequential song called “I’m Upset” and a Degrassi reunion – not the kind of thing about which it makes sense to lie if you want rap culture at large to respect you, quite apart from which Pusha won the beef with his brutal diss track “The Story of Adidon”, despite Drake putting up a genuine fight with his diss track, the admittedly strong “Duppy”. There’s the seemingly endless parade of lyrics in which he behaves like a typical asshole guy (if you please trust me that I intend to use this word with zero homophobic connotations whatsoever, I genuinely think le mot juste is “fuckboy”), talking about rifling through his girlfriend’s phone on some controlling jealous dickhead shit or whatever the fuck – the examples of this are too numerous and too depressing to get into, but it feels like he consciously thrives on encouraging, and makes an effort to encourage, toxic and emotionally abusive behaviour in his male fans, and strives to condition his female fans to accept it; I know how serious a charge that is, but I genuinely don’t see a reason for him to write these lyrics and record and release these songs if he doesn’t actually want to be perceived this way. Crucially, there’s the fact that he at least briefly dated a girl who was still in high school when he himself was in his mid-30s, which is disreputable no matter how charitable you’re minded to be to him. In a lot of ways, the most astute comment about him I've ever heard is from the ingenious Pakistani-American Leftist political commentator Ayesha Siddiqi, who said on Twitter that he “keeps her smiling into her fist.”
So the guy's a card. And for all that, he's made songs I genuinely dig (both pop songs like “One Dance” and “Toosie Slide” and rap songs like “Fear”, “Say What's Real”, and “5 AM In Toronto”), spit vivid bars about pimps from Augusta and the new eleven, coaxed from Rihanna the warmest and most beautifully human-sounding vocal performance she's ever put to tape, developed such a great ear for melody that even the hooks to songs you don’t like stick in your head, dismantled Meek Mill with one song (despite his valiant too-little-too-late effort, which was called “War Pain”) and annihilated Common with a single bar, and maintained impressive enough overall rap skills that they almost – not quite, but almost – justify everything, except perhaps the borderline paedophilia. And, as I mentioned above, “Hold On, We’re Going Home” remains almost unbearably transcendent. So. I guess it's kinda good to have him around?
The Millie Bobby Brown shit just cements his status as a worthless tool IMO. I make sure to pirate his music on the rare occasions I feel like listening to it.