THE MISEDUCATION AND EMBARRASSMENT OF DRAKE

Is Drake, the Toronto rap behemoth, misunderstood, fraudulent, a colonizer, or just an artist?

In actuality, when Sandra Sher and Dennis Graham met at a club where Graham was performing at, they were just engaging in the good old-fashioned Ashkenazi and Black man allurement that seems to constantly propel the two ethnicities into a titillating interracial courtship; they weren’t, at least to our knowledge, trying to turn hip-hop sideways and upside-down. But, in a fate that wouldn’t even make the first draft of a Spike Lee joint, by conceiving their son, Aubrey Drake Graham, they did change hip-hop; it’s just still unclear to many people whether it’s for the better. I’m reminded of “Sandi” and Dennis — and their forbidden fruit of a love — every single time I wonder, or write, about their son. Drake, the Jewish, Black, and Canadian behemoth, is now the chip that begins the poker game, the conversation at the Black dinner table, and the litmus test for your adoration of the culture, and your real reasons for gatekeeping it. At times, the absence of monoculture in hip-hop, where regional emcees are now internet stars who conventional people might not know, has made the genre as difficult as a dentist appointment to talk about publicly. This is not a problem with Aubrey. Certainly, Drake has longtime fans, with OVO tattoos to match, but he also has a history of intense detractors, who all either want him eradicated from the rap game altogether or have lamented the moral rot that made this biracial boy’s success possible. He is more than a rapper, or a pop star who raps; he is a morally suspect worldview. 

Drake is an artist that relies on memory and identity, whether he is feeling like the birarical boy with Jewish existentialism or becoming the faux mafia don that you can’t touch. His longing for the women of the past, for the innocence that he left behind, and the soft agitation at both of his parents, and their mistakes and identity, are the hallmarks of his career, and how he relates to the listener. You, yourself, insert your women that got away from you because of your immature behavior in the pronouns said in Drake’s music; you, yourself, make yourself feel better by becoming more self-absorped. Identity is constantly tinkered with, too, allowing Drake to be malleable, remediating our vision of him as a glasses-wearing and light-skinned Urkel: On So Far Gone, he was the upstart from Toronto, finally leaving the city on his own and developing new sounds, new cultures. “Don’t ever forget the moment you began to doubt/Transitioning from fitting in to standing out”, he says, talking like he is starring in his own documentary, personally sponsored by OVO. Take Care might have been the most stable medium between the Drake who celebrated Pesach and the one with braids and a caribbean accent: the New York rap maximalism of “Lord Knows”, the Lex Luger impersonation on “HYFR”, the cloud rap and soul on “Crew Love”, and the swanky R&B of “Cameras/Good Ones Go” are the moment it was clear Drake would be on top of hip-hop as long as he didn’t allow Baka to rap with him. On Nothing was The Same, he was living in the Yola estate and throwing parties in the Carribean — putting accented gangsters on sumptuous and lively outros. A decade after Wayne entered his prime, a Canadian was entering his, except the purists were less enthused. At its best, hip-hop’s aim is to give a voice to young Black men whose voices have been rendered mute through white supremacy and poverty. Although Drake’s privilege didn’t always extend to economic freedom — Sandi had fallen on hard times by the time Drake was teenager — he was hardly DMX; sometimes, he feels like a struggling actor, trying on new clothes and seeing which one fits. Rap fandom is like that, we often go through different emcees as our favorites, but rappers haven’t really been like that. (Jay-Z is a notable exception. When he first came out, he sounded much less accessible — more legato than staccato — than the patient and crisp flows he would refine on Reasonable Doubt. But practicing your skill is different than being a different person altogether). Give him this credit, though: Drake understands music — Black music, at that. He’s never sounded more at home than when he raps or sings over New Orleans bounce; he’s never rapped more nimbly than when a distorted soul sample comes on. If the behemoth became a behemoth, he did it by making Black music that people could dance to and make love to. 

Drake wanted to shift the masculinities and anxieties of the game, and allow hip-hop to wonder if a less cool Michael Jackson could rap as well. Since we’re dealing with a sound that keps evolving, it’s become almost cliche to talk about how he’s been able to keep up with the times. But it’s uncanny, unparalleled for someone fifteen years in. This is a genre for young people; not older men cheating the fountain of youth. To me, the visible technique that Drake has is his saving grace — the attribute that will last long after he leaves us, and his painfully boyish celebrity subsides. It’s the little things within in the music, these nuggets of craft that have carried him for fifteen years: the way “Take Care” develops into this weird Gil-Scott Heron sample; the snares and hot steel of “Star 67” and the “hit it then dead her/that’s my vendetta” line; the slow jam of “After Dark”; the way he pulls off Lil Wayne’s “Crying Out for Me” flow on “HYFR”; the demonic charisma on the second verse of “Know Yourself”; the absurdly casual cockiness of “Cameras”; the “and that voice in your speakers that’s me” line on “Shot for Me”; the rolling legato on “The Motion”; and, the boastful longing of “Feel No Ways.” They were other rappers who sang before Drake, for certain; but no one made it a part of the branding and gimmick like he did. Even if he took a darker man’s style along with him, his nerve to do things that no other rapper, or pop rapper, has done before was the first rumblings of an earthquake. 

Yet, to like Drake and his instinctive tools is to be unsettled by his equally as instinctive philosophies towards new artists, and his sometimes dubious relationship with the same thing that makes him compelling: his identity. On “Look What You’ve Done”, he makes the mistake of thinking that his dad not being around is strictly a thing that happens to Black kids. “My father living in Memphis now, he can’t come this way/over some minor charges and child support that hasn’t been paid/boo-hoo, sad story, Black American dad story.” White fathers leave just as much as Black dads do, sometimes through the divorce court, or by throwing money at the problem; money that Black fathers do not have. On “You & The 6”, he raps like a tragic mulatto, saying, “I used to get teased for being Black now I’m not Black enough.” You can tell from this blabber that Drake doesn’t know enough about race — that maybe being from Canada is hurting his need to be accepted by the brothers and sisters that have influenced him musically. Being “too Black for the Jews and too Jewish for the Blacks” isn’t going to help the people in your communities that have been playing your music, but are also waiting for someone darker to have the success that Drake’s enjoyed. Or, are simply waiting for you to completely stand with them. Sometimes, enjoying Drake’s music means begrudgingly accepting that this biracial boy can’t overcome his Ashkenazi blood that sometimes casts him as a My Player like he was made in a fictional Hip-Hop 2K09 video game.

Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” is a declaration of war against Drake’s identity, making it impossible to stand with Aubrey in a room full of Black people. The song is an unconscionable hit: a good friend that I have — a Kendrick stan — tormented me in our Lyft ride together by playing it. If the song wasn’t so enjoyable, I’d cry. It’s funky, and not in a drowsy way, but in the way that makes women want to shake their asses in your face. Drake’s getting beat up here, his shirt is forced up over his head by an imposing Lamar, who has the entire neighborhood rooting for him. It felt like I was getting beat up for being someone who can remember screaming “10 Bands” in my dorm hallway. “You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars/Nah, You’re not a colleague/you’re a fucking colonizer”, says, Lamar, delivering a death blow. People have been dancing to this song at the club, at cookouts, in hookah lounge, in Harlem bars, and at their Aunt's house. Black cousins, Black dads, Black aunts, Black workers, and Black cousins are dancing to “Not Like Us” to forget about the crackers that they have to work for; whites are dancing to be down with us again, because Lamar is so convincing that they would look like crackers for supporting Drake. Light-skinned cats, even though they look more like Drake than they do Kendrick, are so glad to be down, believe themselves to be better than Drake’s somewhat apoliticalness, and are choosing K-Dot’s side. (This is more complicated, but sometimes that’s as much of a performance as Drake’s faux accents. Drake is an artist, thus his induction into culture is more at the street level of hip-hop. The rest of you best biracial boys saw a white boy be racist in your suburb, and it inspired you to get down to Malcolm X speeches. I’m not so enthused by your peformativeness either). 

That symbolism — that the black community is congregating in their spaces to dance to a song that disses him — is devastating for Drake, someone who has always relied on OG’s and communities that allowed for Sandi’s son to ride along in the culture despite the fact that, yes, he is automatically a Black man. Wayne and Baby signed him. Then, Bun B made it safe for him to lift from Houston slang on “November 18th.” Drake is many things; one of them is a Black man. Other rappers, though, are just Black. Lamar, critics, and fans, have a right to be critical towards Drake. He’s had some unforced errors: the Megan thee Stallion line on Her Loss, although it’s more of a double entendre than it is a diss, was something he didn’t need to get involved in. After “Like That” dropped, a good decision might have been to wait a while for responding, or to not respond at all. “Diss me, and you’ll never hear a reply from it”, was a line he spat on So Far Gone. In the past ten years that changed, and he decided to spar with folks with more authentic ties than he has. That’s a recipe for disaster for the young man, who shouldn’t be beefing. His legacy is one of shifting hip-hop, making it more versatile, multi-purposed, without losing the basic elements of the genre: its egocentrism, its messiness. It doesn’t have to be winning beefs. Nobody who is a Drake fan is a Drake fan because they want him to win a beef against Pusha T; we’re Drake fans because the music drowns out any disapproval people have of his identity and hip-hop aesthetic.

Were this not such an overwhelmingly great dance song, I wonder if Drake would be so defeated. It’s easy to forget, when you hear “Not Like Us”, how strong and charismatic Drake’s “Family Matters” diss is. The final verse, where Drake delivers a rising legato that mirrors climbing up a mountain, is one of the best rap performances of his entire career. It exposes Kendrick for the fact that the critical darlings — mostly white folks who don’t love hip-hop like the streets do — value his music more than Drake’s. Drake compared K-Dot to MJ, who slashed his Blackness for whiteness — in the same way that Kendrick sometimes hops on Taylor Swift and other pop songs like hers and raps for white people. This is not an untrue line. Drake is a pop artist but Kendrick is someone who sometimes needs white pop stars to either keep his celebrity at a stable place, or use them for financial security. For all of Drake’s issues with his Blackness, he has worked with more young artists than Kendrick has, who has ignored his excellent features like Fredo Santana’s “Jealous” for more critical acclaim. Kendrick won; he isn’t your savior, as he continues to show us in his music and politics. 

Those who reject Drake because he is biracial and lacks the community backing — Kanye lacked street cred but he was the Black community — are missing out on his gift for flow, songwriting, and 40’s pretty, but occasionally tart production. It can be giganticly frustrating to watch him overextend himself, absorbing all of the jokes about his Jewish boy sensisitvity, and start throwing thinly-veiled mob threats at imaginary, or even truthful, enemies. Even if he is mostly winking at the audience while doing it, it’s become increasingly clear that people are starting to wane on that side of him. The empathy that I have for his predicament —- that if he doesn’t rap he is this sensitive pop star, or that he doesn’t sing he is this fake tough guy —- doesn’t mean that he has to give into the urge to prove that he’s a heavy. Next album, or project, should come after months of rest, and relaxation. A summer smash, in the “In My Feelings” lane, is a necessity. Make people forget about these series of embarrassments; our attention spans get short when another hit skyrockets. As much as deep cuts like “5PM in Toronto'' ring out, remind me at specific times of my life where I was a young buck growing up alongside Drake, they also seem to be creating an image of Drake that he might not want to promote: a light-skinned bully, getting too big for his bridges, controlling the rap game from his mansion while others starve.