daily 10/20/2015

• Drake Is the Biggest Dork in Hip Hop and He Knows It

  • Consider that when we met Drake was a biracial, Canadian Jewish kid who was most famous for playing a tragically injured paraplegic on a teen soap opera.
  • Drake trusts himself, his talent and his palate enough to throw a song or a dumb motto out into the crowd and wait for us all to fall in line because yeah, when you give it a minute, it actually is pretty counterintuitively dope.
  • In this way, he has always been conscious dork. A lot of dorks don’t necessarily realize how they’re perceived. Sure, they know they’re not cool, but it may not occur to them that people actively consider them to be lame.
  • I mean, the man’s mascot is an owl for Christ’s sake. A damn owl—perhaps the most dweeb-like animal in nature.
  • Drake’s dorkiness works because he is always in on the joke. It’s OK for us to laugh and make fun of him because when it comes down to it, he’s laughing with us and we’re fans of the music. He’s sold over ten million albums, “Hotling Bling” currently has over 96 million plays on Spotify and it will likely hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
  • This works for Drake largely because he believes so strongly (at least ostensibly) in whatever he’s trying to sell us that eventually it doesn’t even seem uncool anymore and the next thing you know you have a self-proclaimed gangsta like The Game rapping about protecting “every nigga with an owl on his chest.”
  • Despite some of the weird, coded analyses of him, Drake is not a thug and hasn’t ever really pretended to be. Drake openly commits to his dorkiness, which, truly, is the most important part of making any art.

• Does Drake Actually Know What He’s Doing?

  • Sargent also pointed out: “I think the subtext of a lot of his persona is that even he can’t believe he can get away with it.”

             

    At times, no one can. But that, really, is the joy of Drake.

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