Diffuse fits Drake’s indistinct aura, too: half-black and half-Jewish, he is the all-pervading master of an American street art who will nonetheless always be an outsider because of his Canadian nationality and middle-class upbringing.
Drake’s vagueness carries through to his unfixed lyrics: endless celebrations of his own success and stature that are almost always creased with unease and ambivalence, plus his patent brand of not-quite-love songs that combine suppurating sensitivity and emotional evasiveness.
Take Hotline Bling, his inescapable megahit of 2015, whose woozy lilt and hangdog sensuality walked a fine line (like everything Drake has done) between addictive and annoying. What would you even call the emotion in this song? Drake pines for a former sexual arrangement that seems to have been at best undefined; he expresses mild distress that the girl appears to be flourishing in his absence, or at least going out partying a lot.
As pop romance goes, it is not exactly Reach Out (I’ll Be There). It is not even One in a Million by Aaliyah, whose minimalist R&B was such an influence on Drake and his principal producer, Noah “40” Shebib.
As determined as he is indeterminate, Drake has diffused himself all across the rap and R&B radioscape this past half-decade, maintaining ubiquity not just with the steady stream of his own hit singles, but with innumerable appearances on other people’s songs, ranging from superstars such as Rihanna to rising MCs such as iLoveMakonnen to the ghost of Aaliyah herself. Last year’s collaborations with Future – Where Ya At and Jumpman – have remained staples of US urban radio well into 2016.
Drake’s success at spreading his sound and self far and wide owes much to his actorly adaptability and seeming desire to be everything to everybody. He will be baleful and paranoid on a moody, bare-bones track such as Energy.
He will quiet-storm it on moist’n’misty ballads such as Marvins Room. He will put out a boppy ditty not a million miles from Justin Bieber’s recent tropical house hits, such as his new single One Dance, which samples an old track by UK funky diva Kyla.
But the diffusion of Drake also has something to do with the way he has defused hip-hop, uncoupled it from the explosive content once at the core of the genre. Raised primarily in an affluent Toronto suburb, a successful TV actor in his teens, Drake shrewdly avoids street realities such as crime as song topics.
(Whenever he has come even close to this subject matter – referencing lawyers and the prison commissary on Where Ya At, claiming to have Started From the Bottom – it has been jarring and unconvincing.) But nor is Drake a conscious rapper.
As a mixed-race Canadian, he has perhaps felt it is not his place to comment on American racial conflicts: Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, the sort of issues an MC such as Kendrick Lamar can, and is driven to, address.
Drake has plenty of company in rap when it comes to being resolutely apolitical. Still, even the most party-hard, commodity-fetishising gangsta rappers have still communicated some sense of the social backdrop that explains their feral drive for success and all its spoils.
Jay Z, DMX, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, TI, Future – there has always been the idea of overcoming somewhere in their music: the rap game was usually chosen as an alternative to destructive, outlaw ways of making money and a name. That provided a context for the tyrannical postures and gruesome threats, the callous sexism and brand flaunting. Gangsta rap was not about The Struggle, but it had struggle in it.
Drake’s innovation as a rapper is that the only adversity he has ever really claimed to have faced is the adversity of fame itself.
It is virtually his only subject. Even the not-really-love songs are part of this, since they stem from the fracturing of relationships that comes about when someone is constantly travelling and constantly tempted. In Doing It Wrong, Drake croons ruefully about how: “We live in a generation of not being in love and not being together.”
And apparently, given his popularity, many people find his resolutely irresolute and emotionally non-committal outlook highly relatable.
Right from the start, with his 2009 breakthrough mixtape So Far Gone, Drake was writing about the problems caused by celebrity.
Whether this was an act of imaginative anticipation, or because he had been pre-famed through his role in the popular Canadian teen soap Degrassi: The Next Generation, it is hard to say. But on songs such as The Calm Drake was already moaning about feeling overstretched and cut off: “Feelin’ so distant from everyone I’ve known / To make everybody happy, I think I would need a clone … All my first dates are interrupted by my fame.”
He has repeated the same themes, the same mood (oscillation between triumph and torment) across his subsequent albums Thank Me Later, Take Care, his masterwork Nothing Was the Same, and If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. Authenticity matters as much for Drake as for any rapper, and authenticity means writing about what you know. Fame is pretty much all Drake knows.
It is a tribute to his powers of invention, his strange and grotesque genius, that Drake has so far managed to find so many compelling variations on such a restricted set of themes: the dream that turns out not to be as dreamy as you had expected; feeling alone even in the midst of an entourage and a wild party; complaints, already fairly familiar in rap, about how money changes everything and creates more problems than its absence. Haters and gold-diggers were long established in rap as inevitable accoutrements of fame about which you could whinge-boast (hip-hop’s equivalent of the humble-brag).
But Drake went the next step and talked about the hollow-inside feeling that came with conquering the throne and acquiring all the trophies. As he croons in All Me, “Got everything, I got everything / I cannot complain, I cannot” – but still, still, he complains: about feeing empty, feeling numb. Picking up on pointers left by Kanye West on 808s & Heartbreak, but pushing further ahead, Drake made having a spiritual void into rap’s new status symbol. Morose and maudlin, not Maybach and Margiela, became the mark of megastardom.
From Clipse to TI, the trap was rap’s reigning metaphor during the first decade of the 21st century, a reference to the place where drugs are sold but also the idea of that life as a dead end (along with the related idea of luring and enslaving the clientele, mostly members of the dealer’s own race, class, community). In Drake’s decade, the 2010s, fame itself – the escape-route alternative to crime pursued by gangsta rappers – has become a trap of its own. The godfathers of gangsta, NWA talked about “reality rap”; Drake’s self-invented genre is unreality rap, or perhaps hyper-reality rap.
Both the mise-en-scène and the topics of his songs – penthouse suites, after-show parties, VIP rooms, award shows, inter-celebrity dating, internet gossip, the proliferation of the public self as an image and a meme – are remote from the world most of us inhabit.
We gawp at it from the outside. Drake’s art is all about achieving access to this hyper-real world – a realm of front, rumour, bravado, optics, public relations – and then bemoaning how unreal it feels to live inside it. The glittering insubstantiality of the music – which resembles Harold Budd, Aphex Twin and Radiohead circa Kid A as much as Timbaland, the Weeknd or DJ Mustard – is the perfect aural match for the mirrored maze of modern celebreality. The airless sound evokes the sealed vacuum of loneliness-at-the-top.
Drake’s ascendance happened so instantly it felt effortless, achieved without struggle, almost to the point of seeming unearned. In Thank Me Now, he rapped about how he “can relate to kids going straight to the league” – a reference to high-school players so talented they skip college basketball and go straight to the NBA. In the same song, Drake declares: “Damn, I swear sports and music are so synonymous.”
Drake does love his sports analogies and allusions. The song 30 for 30 Freestyle, from the Future collaboration What a Time To Be Alive, is named after a celebrated ESPN series of sports documentaries. Drake even framed his feud with Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill using baseball and basketball references. He named Back To Back, the second of his counter-attack tracks, after the Toronto Blue Jays’ serial defeats of the Philadelphia Phillies in 1993, and namechecked the basketball consultant/power-broker William Wesley in the song’s second line.
The rise of Drake shows that rap has become a merit-based system that works just like sports. The old metrics of credibility and authority, based around where you came from, your experience, “the strength of street knowledge” as NWA put it, as well as around technique and chutzpah – no longer counts as much as sheer proficiency: the skill with which an MC could manipulate the tropes of a genre that is codified almost to the point of having rules. Like sports, rap has become a self-perpetuating and enclosed system in which star players and rival teams compete for the pole position and for superior stats. We follow rap like we follow sports: as excited onlookers thrilling vicariously to the clashes, the victories, the glory. It has nothing to do with real life.
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