Women and Ownership in Drake Lyrics
How Drake restricts female identity with possession
I know when that hotline bling, you’re probably about to drop some misogynistic lyrics.
When I heard the song “Hotline Bling” my first thought was — what is a hotline bling? After some quick lyrical reconnaissance, I was no longer confused about the state of the modern lexicon. Instead, I was irritated on behalf of the girl Drake is singing to.
I wanted to use a corpus-based approach to explore my discomfort with the song. Has Drake always felt this way about women? Is this patronizing tone a new or recurrent theme in his music? Does he want a good girl or a bad girl? All questions that no doubt consume our day-to-day lives.
The challenge of implicit ownership
To start, I created a corpus of Drake lyrics between 2006 and 2016. (Note: if you’re interested in the methodology and sample I used, I describe it in more detail at the end of this post.)
I quickly identified that my issue with “Hotline Bling” is Drake’s implicit ownership of the woman in question. Drake comes off as a possessive creep because he assumes he has a say in her choices, her clothing, and her friends.
Anything implicit, of course, presents a challenge from the perspective of text-based analysis. Drake doesn’t come out and say, “You are MINE, woman!” Patronizing and misogynistic themes are, by nature, usually veiled.
To investigate this hunch, I looked into how Drake used possessive pronouns. I wanted to see if women came up frequently as an owned “thing.”
The word “girl” was, in fact, a frequently used collocate of Drake’s possessive pronouns — “my girl” shows up 26 times in the corpus and “your girl” appears 28 times.
This is indicative, but inconclusive — especially when you consider other possessive pronouns which were used less frequently:
The fact that “her tongue” is the most frequently used combo is somewhat disturbing, but it only shows up three times in the corpus — not enough for statistically valid evidence.
“I’m wealthy! Young! I talk shit ’til I die!”
The most frequently used word in Drake’s song lyrics is “I,” appearing 5,113 times. Like many rappers (or recording artists in general), Drake likes to talk about himself.
One possessive word kept showing up in Drake’s self-talk — “got.”
“Got” appears 564 times and it’s the most frequently used collocate of “I,” with “I got” showing up 221 times in the corpus. With this information, it’s safe to say that ownership is one of the main ways Drake establishes his identity. So how did Drake’s ownership compare to other groups?
According to the corpus, “she” clearly owns less things. But it was Drake’s usage of “you got” where I uncovered an interesting trend.
Of the 56 times that Drake says “you got,” 31 of them are referring to a woman. Similar to “Hotline Bling,” the context of the lyrics show Drake in direct conversation with a woman. He usually calls her “girl” somewhere just to make it clear.
So… according to the Drake corpus, what can a woman have?
So many splendid options! Personally, as a woman, I know that it would be tough for me to choose between chores and shine. But hey, we can’t have it all.
“But he says ‘the sweetest heart,’” you say. “Doesn’t that demonstrate Drake understands the depth of a woman’s personality beyond sex and material goods?”
Sure. Except he’s talking about his mother.
Beyond that? A woman, according to the Drake corpus, has two basic options — sex and men, or material goods. But mostly sex.
So what does Drake “own”?
In contrast, when Drake refers to what he’s “got,” he has many more options at his disposal. If Drake defines his own identity through a wealth of possessive phrases, what does that mean for the woman who has none?
These phrases build a complex identity that is not accessible to the women in his lyrics. Just look at the variety in this word cloud:
To demonstrate this, I pulled out some of my favorite examples. They range from broadcasts of excessive materialism and sexual dominance to expressions of personality and career potential.
Things that Drake has:
- Lust for life
- Desire to improve
- Decent set of manners
- A Grammy
- Them wedding ring flows
- Strippers in his life, but they virgins
- Racks like Serena
- A city that he Carey[s] like Mariah
- Sexy ladies, a whole Benz-full
- The gift like Santa Clause
ALL of these things show a level of personal complexity that evades Drake’s understanding of women.
It is now evident to me why I found Drake’s construction of the female identity so troublesome. There are, in theory, very real implications.
As a twenty-something with the acumen and resources to embark on this research project, I’m able to compartmentalize these themes. But is there a risk of young people internalizing these lyrics? What happens to girls and boys that listen to Drake’s music and deduce that, for women, a successful future is not a culturally accepted or realistic path?
Why you shouldn’t stop listening to Drake
When I was in the beginning stages of this project, a friend directed me to a podcast interview that New Republic’s Jamil Smith did with Melissa Harris-Perry, the renowned professor, activist, and political commentator.
According to Harris-Perry, she has no problem listening to Drake’s music as art, and no longer tries to reconcile listening to hip-hop with her feminist views:
“As far as I know, there have never been any allegations that Drake is anything other than kind of wounded. And so even when his music is troubling it’s still very interesting to me as a kind of cultural product, and as long as we’re engaging it with critical media literacy, I don’t feel any great need to eschew the product itself.”
I feel like I’ve done my “critical media literacy” due-diligence. But I think the concept of consuming media through a critical lens remains elusive, especially for a younger generation that may not understand the meaning of “compartmentalize” or “internalize.”
We can only hope that they take from songs like “Hotline Bling” something like Harris-Perry did:
“When I look at ‘Hotline Bling,’ the main thing I see is a kind of interesting vulnerability around masculinity and an attempt to in fact reinforce a traditional kind of heteronormative masculinity where he’s saying: ‘please stay at home and be a good girl,’ and clearly she could give zero damns about that, and is out having a good time… We don’t really know who she is, but we do sort of like that she has reduced this fool to dancing alone in a box wearing, like, a funny owl sweatshirt.”
Having socially appropriate messages in our media is important. But it’s even more important that we, as consumers of media, see everything through a critical lens. Only through critical consumption can we establish and then advocate for what we believe to be right and true.
I’m not suggesting that you embark on an in-depth analysis of Fetty Wap’s lyrics because the song “Trap Queen” drives you crazy. But think about it, talk about it, and raise awareness by spreading your knowledge around.
The fine print — How did I find this stuff?
The results discussed in this blog are by no means infallible. I’ve been teaching myself corpus linguistics and I consider this part of the learning process. To that end, feedback and questions from the community on my findings are more than appreciated! Twitter is the best way to reach out.
Here are some notes on my methodology:
- For my sample I analyzed songs on Drake albums released in 2009–2016 for a total sample size of 88,666 words.
- This study did not account for featured artists. Basically, this means that the study analyzed Drake’s songs rather than strictly Drake’s lyrics in the songs.
- I ended up not including songs by other artists that Drake was featured in. I was pretty torn about this because so much of Drake’s career (especially early on) was built on him popping up in other random rappers’ songs. Compiling songs and accounting for who was actually saying the lyrics would have added a level of complexity that I ultimately didn’t think would impact the findings to a measurable degree.
Thanks for reading!
