Drake: An Unofficial Portrait, Self-Titled
Drake has become the caption laureate and soundtrack auteur for a generation of Zillenials, a portmanteau of Millenial and Gen Z. But what can we learn about the man Aubrey Graham, from Drake, the artist and ‘The Boy’. Few dispute that he introduced unsolicited melancholy with vocals over sultry and chart-topping beats like a lost art. And did so at a time when male and Hip-Hop were almost exclusively synonyms for rap. Even so he remains able to slip into equally agile and hard hitting cadences as a rapper. With that said, how authentic is the heart that he consistently drapes over his album sleeves? Has Drake, over a career of plenty trial and limited error, found a formula that simply works, or is he truly ‘way off in deep end’ of his feelings ‘as usual’?
In the 1960 French film, Breathless, the male protagonist, Michel Poicard, responds pointedly to his American girlfriend’s question, ‘what is your greatest ambition?’ with, ‘to become immortal and then die’. This exchange was caught on camera decades before Aubrey Graham caught his first breath. And more decades still before ‘Drake’ became a bona fide force in the world of music.
Yet, one can’t help but think that today’s Drake would resonate with Poicard almost spiritually here. As early as 2009, on the track ‘Successful’, he expressed, with the help of Trey Songz and Lil Wayne, a wish to be just that. Drake would then go on to announce to his listeners, a little less than ten years later, if we weren’t aware, that he ‘is actually Michael Jackson’. Effectively affirming himself as a dead legend, living, breathing, and flirting with the edges of mortality. On Scorpion, his fifth Studio album, we hear, with no stutter in sight, that ‘I walk in godly form amongst the mortal men’. Perhaps he really is So Far Gone.
These affirmations of grandeur do not fully capture a complex relationship with success. Drake portrays himself as embattled by success. Bearing a heavy burden of sacrifice and pain that also doubles up as an ultimate flex. On Gold Roses, a collab with Rick Ross, Drake seizes the opportunity to remind us that he ‘paid the price to be the boss’, but it wasn’t even his ‘most expensive purchase’. You have to wonder then, how expensive was therapy?
Drake styles himself as creative genius and conscientious master craftsman. He still, however, discovers ways to suffer from holding the invariably poisoned chalice of success. Conflicted, he demands, like his birthright, that ‘you gotta hand it to me’, or more so, ‘gimme that sh*t’, as if he were ‘blind’. In fact, more like the boy Cole Spear in The Sixth Sense, his eyes are very much open and in ways that may beg belief. He goes to great pains to convince us that, beside breeding more success, his success breeds a destructively contagious envy.
As a result, you step through the portal of Drake’s discography into a world of haters, naysayers, frenemies, and even the humble opp. He must, it seems, continue to fan the flames of apparent danger or risk losing his personal currency of success. If he were to do otherwise, Aubrey Graham may fear finding the image of ‘Drake’ foreclosed and fighting bankruptcy. This does in no way diminish how pre-occupied he remains by the harder currencies. He earnestly puts it to his listeners, to not ‘Google my net worth, the numbers are way off’.
Drake presents himself as surrounded by cold shoulders and colder hearts, going as far as to argue that he has ‘no friends in the industry’ on a track sitting in an album boasting 15 guest appearances. A clear theme, however, emerges from Drake’s discography: a strong desire for fraternity. And equally the loyalty and the open generosity that must be joined, at the very least lyrically, with it. He endured, it seems, the ‘Fake Love’ and authentic hate levelled ‘straight up to’ his face, to find a small oasis of kin.
Family for Drake is a loaded topic. And one which he reloads severally across his projects. He shows true self-awareness as he quips ‘I used to challenge my parents on every album’ on a song, March 14, that officially announces the birth of his son, Adonis. While he doubles down on his desire to build a legacy for his son, Drake laments, even if briefly, that he broke his promise to deliver ‘a family unit’. Drake’s parents were separated at 3, Adonis’s parents were separate at birth. As late as 2021, Drake reported that his parent’s divorce was ‘still on me’ suggesting how deeply he may perceive the stakes involved in that broken promise.
Through other means, Drake has built and adopted deeply entrenched bonds of friendship good from the time of purchase till the grave. References to the world of organized crime litter his lyrics, alluding to the importance of brothers tied together by sweat, tears, and much more. But not by blood, unless of course, it belongs to their enemies. Drake deliberately blurs or smudges the lines between the legal and illicit in his music contributing to a certain moral ambiguity. Moral ambiguity and long-running trust issues, however, dissolve when it comes to the Drake’s ‘brothers’.
A moral compass that on the track ‘Is There More’ we discover is ‘janky and breaks in the south’, finds true north in his plentiful wisdom on ensuring the emotional and financial stability of his ‘brothers’ . He is willing to ‘register the business’ in his ‘brother’s name’, investing however much needed ‘to cover things’. Tuning in to the outro of Certified Lover Boy, we discover a similar but perhaps more mature perspective on debt, gratitude, and kinship. He says it will be ‘hard to pay 40, pay Noel, pay Niko back’. With CJ, Chubbs, and Mark, also receiving honorable mentions.
All things considered, Drake on closer inspection of his presents a paradox of sorts. He is not completely mysterious but also not completely without mystery. Drake is an open book — or a series of them — that are inspired by a textbook approach. Drake’s wealth will always be a measure of success. He will continue to aim destructive lyrical wit at his enemies. Failed love affairs and the ghosts of his parents’ divorce will always stalk him.
Drake is the rapper that has everything but as he admits on the More Life playlist-turned-album, ‘Can’t Have Everything’. With many and varying problems, he runs the very unironic risk of solving some and diluting and distorting the Drake ‘we know and love’.
On ‘When to Say When’, Drake reflects that for ‘500 weeks, I filled the charts with my pain’. That pain as well as his stock in the industry seems far from slowing down, with more than 50 billion combined streams on Spotify. His legacy demands that he must keep us, his listeners, as therapists who do not judge, patronize, or gaslight — it may help that our conversations with him are very one-sided.
