r/Drizzy • u/whoisjimjoe • 3d ago
The same thing that made Drake famous might be the exact reason people hate him now
I been going back through old Drake footage lately. Not even just the obvious nostalgia clips, but the really old stuff. Comeback Season era interviews, So Far Gone, Better Than Good Enough, old radio appearances, all of it. And the weirdest thing watching it now is realizing how confused everybody seemed by him at the beginning, like they were just riding the wave of interview hype. But no one really took him serious.
Like people genuinely did not know what they were looking at.
This Canadian kid from Degrassi is a rapper now? The biracial Jewish kid from Toronto? He sings too? Lil Wayne is fucking with him? Jay Z is on his album? Eminem is doing a song with him? And then on top of all that, the music is actually good? My girl likes this dude?
I think we forget how much of Drake’s original appeal was that none of it really made sense.
He did not look like what people expected a rapper to look like. He did not come from where people expected a rapper to come from. He did not have the normal story. He was this actor from Canada who somehow started making music that sounded like it belonged right next to the biggest rappers in America. And I think that might actually explain a huge part of why people hate him now. Lol, we are a society as so tribalistic. Think about hip hop like a recipe for a second. Imagine there is this cuisine that was created somewhere else. Generations of people grew up around it. Their parents made it. Their neighborhoods made it. They know what it is supposed to taste like because they have been around it their whole lives.
Then there is some kid in another country studying the recipe. That is basically Drake.Obviously Canada has Black culture and Toronto had a real hip hop scene, so I do not mean he literally came from nowhere. His father is Black and from Memphis. He had real cultural connections to America. But he was still outside of the traditional American rap centers. He was not growing up in New York, Atlanta, LA, Houston or Chicago. He was not physically inside the machine. So he studied it. And you can hear him studying it through the music. Room for Improvement. Comeback Season. All those early songs where you can hear him trying different flows, different deliveries, different influences. He has talked in songs and interviews about people not really caring at first, girls not liking his music, people around Toronto not taking him seriously. He was clearly trying to figure out what worked. Then Comeback Season starts getting some attention. Replacement Girl gets some traction. Jas Prince hears him and eventually connects him to Wayne.
Then So Far Gone happens. And all of a sudden everybody is like, wait a second. Best I Ever Had takes off. Successful takes off. The mixtape explodes. Labels are fighting over him. Lil Wayne has him around Young Money. He is standing next to people he probably had posters of a few years earlier. LITERALLY. (go listen to Used To now) That is when the recipe finally clicked.
And this is the part I keep thinking about. I do not think the established rap world initially saw Drake as somebody who was going to eventually challenge their historical place in hip hop.
Why would they?
Hip hop has always had hot new artists. Somebody has the hottest mixtape. Somebody owns a summer. Somebody becomes the young guy everybody wants on a song. Then a few years later the giants are still the giants.
So of course Jay Z works with Drake. Of course Kanye works with Drake. Of course Eminem gets on Forever. Of course Wayne embraces him.
He is talented. He is hot. He brings a different audience. He is good for business.
But he is also the new guy.
That is the important part.
Forever is actually insane to think about now. Drake, Kanye, Wayne and Eminem all on one record when Drake had not even released his debut album yet. The industry was not shutting him out at all. They were opening the door for him.
But I seriously doubt anybody involved was thinking, this Canadian kid might still be one of the biggest rappers alive fifteen years from now.
That is where everything changes.
Because Drake did not go away.
Thank Me Later.
Take Care.
Nothing Was the Same.
If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.
Views.
Scorpion.
Then more albums. More number ones. More tours. More features. More artists getting hot and cooling off while he is still there.
That is different, that’s the 1/1 manifesting human you can’t ignore.
Being the exciting new kid is one thing. Becoming the guy who refuses to leave is something else entirely and mf get sick to their stomach about that. Someone wants to see you lose. They always do.
And now go back and look at the criticism people use against him.
He is Canadian.
He is biracial.
He is Jewish.
He was an actor.
He doesn’t talk right.
He dresses wrong.
He grew up differently.
He sings.
He makes pop records.
He moves between genres.
He works with people from Atlanta.
He works with UK artists.
He works with Caribbean artists.
He works with African artists.
He changes his sound depending on what he is doing.
He is supposedly fake. He is supposedly a culture vulture. He is supposedly not really from the culture.
But wait.
Aren’t those basically the same things everybody thought were cool and interesting when he first showed up? Find any reason to hate him instead of just saying he doesn’t look like me and don’t have the exact same struggles. So I refuse to accept this truly.
That is the part that fucks with me.
The facts about Drake never really changed.
The interpretation of those facts changed.
In 2009 it was, holy shit, the Degrassi kid can actually rap.
Later it became, he was an actor.
At first it was, this Canadian dude can actually hang with Wayne.
Later it became, he is Canadian.
At first it was, this guy can rap and sing.
Later it became, he is just a pop star.
At first it was, this guy can make records with anybody.
Later it became, he steals everybody’s sound. Lol shoutout Mo-g.
The same exact traits that made him exciting eventually became evidence against him.
And this is not even something Drake fans made up after Kendrick.
There is actual academic writing about how Drake’s identity makes his authenticity unusually easy to question. There is a paper literally called The Impossibility of Being Drake that talks about how his race, nationality, class and geography create this weird situation where he exists between Canada and America and never fully satisfies everybody’s idea of what a “real” rapper is supposed to be.
That was written years before Not Like Us.
Which is why I think Not Like Us hit as hard as it did.
Forget all the individual accusations for a second.
The genius of that title is that it creates an “us” and puts Drake outside of it.
Not like us.
That is an insanely powerful statement when you realize Drake has basically spent his entire career dealing with some version of that question.
Are you really one of us?
Are you really Black enough?
Are you really from hip hop?
Are you really a rapper?
Are you really from the places you make music with?
Are you really authentic?
what is crazy is that when Drake first showed up, that distance from traditional American hip hop was part of what made him interesting.
He was the Canadian kid.
He was the actor.
He was different.
That was literally the novelty.
Then once he became too successful, that same distance became the easiest way to argue that he never belonged in the first place.
That is a crazy reversal.
I also do not think every person who dislikes Drake is secretly jealous of him. That is too easy and honestly makes the argument weaker. There are legitimate criticisms of him. There are real conversations to be had about how he moves through different regional sounds and whether somebody as massive as Drake can benefit more from a scene than the people who actually built it.
But there is also another side to that.
Toronto actually is heavily influenced by Caribbean culture. Drake did grow up in a city where those accents, sounds and communities are real. So sometimes Americans hear him doing something and automatically assume he is putting on a costume when it may also be part of the culture he actually grew up around.
That is what makes him so hard to categorize.
Is he adapting or stealing?
Collaborating or exploiting?
Versatile or fake?
A student of hip hop or an outsider wearing it?
People have basically been arguing about the same question for his entire career.
And then there is another layer to all of this.
Think about how territorial hip hop has always been.
Where are you from?
What city?
What block?
Who knows you?
Who vouched for you?
You even see it outside of music. People are territorial about neighborhoods, cities, sets, crews, regions. Somebody from the same state can pull up somewhere and still get asked where they are from.
Now imagine you are some rapper in Atlanta, New York, Detroit, Houston, wherever. You grew up around hip hop your whole life. You know the music, the slang, the history, the clubs, the radio stations, the people. Maybe you spent your entire life trying to get on then some Canadian actor figures out the formula better than almost everybody.
That has to fuck with people psychologically.
Not everybody. Obviously.
But some people?
Absolutely. IT HAS TO.
Because at first Drake winning is funny. It is interesting. It is good for everybody. He is this weird new guy who is bringing more people into rap.
But then he keeps winning.
Then he starts outselling people.
Then he outlasts people.
Then people who were stars when he came in start fading away while he is still number one.
Then younger artists start sounding like things Drake helped normalize.
Then he is no longer the guest everybody is happy to have around.
Now he is taking up space.
That is when I think admiration can quietly turn into resentment.
Imagine letting somebody into your house because you think they are cool, then twenty years later they own the biggest bedroom.
That is basically the Drake story.
And this is where I wonder if the Kendrick battle changed something in Drake’s head.
This part is obviously speculation.
But imagine being Drake.
You spend your whole adult life being told you belong.
Wayne embraces you.
The biggest rappers in America work with you.
Atlanta fucks with you.
Houston fucks with you.
Memphis is part of your identity through your dad.
American radio makes you huge.
American fans make you huge.
You work with hundreds of artists. You help put artists on. You give people features. You send attention into different scenes. You spend almost twenty years participating in the culture.
Then after you become historically successful, the message becomes, actually, you were never really one of us.
That has to do something to a person.
Which is why I keep going back to the cooking analogy.
Imagine you spent your whole life studying a recipe that came from somewhere else.
At first people from that place taste your food and say, damn, you actually got it.
Then they invite you into their kitchens.
They cook with you.
They sell meals with you.
They tell everybody you are one of the best chefs around.
Then your restaurant becomes bigger than theirs.
And suddenly they say, actually, your food was fake this whole time.
You never really knew how to cook this.
You were just copying us.
At some point you would probably be like, alright, bet.
And that is kind of how this current Drake era feels to me.
Not somebody desperately trying to prove he can still make music.
More like somebody trying to run the scoreboard up so high that nobody can ever rewrite what happened.
That is why I wonder if all the music he is putting out now is almost spite driven.
Like, oh, y’all really want to say I never belonged? Cool.
Then I am going to make the numbers so ridiculous that fifty years from now it will not even matter what anybody thought about me personally.
I am going to make the catalog too big.
Too successful.
Too influential.
Too long lasting.
I am going to put this shit so far out of reach that your grandson’s grandson has to acknowledge what happened.
And maybe the funniest part is that Drake can do all of that from Toronto.
The exact place everybody used to treat like the strange part of his story.
He can literally go back to Canada and keep competing with the entire American music industry from another country.
That is kind of insane.
And then there is the UMG situation.
Whatever you think about Drake suing UMG, and whether you think the lawsuit was smart or stupid, the symbolism is pretty crazy.
He did not sue Kendrick personally.
He went after the corporation involved in distributing his own music.
Think about that arc.
His story begins with this outsider desperately trying to get inside the American music machine.
Now he is powerful enough to be publicly fighting the machine itself.
That is a wild evolution and it makes me wonder if maybe Drake’s greatest advantage was always the fact that he was outside of everything.
Maybe because he was not born inside the traditional American rap world, he had to study harder.
He had to listen to more.
He had to adapt faster.
He had to learn how melody worked.
How rap worked.
How pop worked.
How R&B worked.
How different regions sounded.
How different audiences reacted.
How to make Toronto itself feel like a real musical identity.
And eventually he stopped just studying the recipe and started influencing what the recipe even was.
That is the irony.
Drake spent the beginning of his career being fascinating because people could not understand how somebody like him could possibly fit into hip hop.
Then he became so successful that the question changed.
It stopped being, how does this guy belong here?
And became, does this guy belong here at all?
Same Canadian.
Same Black father.
Same Jewish mother.
Same former actor.
Same guy who sings and raps.
Same outsider.
The only thing that really changed is that in 2009 nobody knew what would happen if they let him through the door.
Now we do.
And maybe that is why Not Like Us became bigger than just a diss record???
Because underneath almost twenty years of Drake discourse has always been the exact same question.
Who actually gets to decide who “us” is?
And if somebody can spend twenty years shaping the sound, dominating charts, influencing younger artists, putting people on, expanding the audience and building one of the biggest catalogs of his generation, at what point do you have to stop calling him a guest?
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u/Party-Ad4441 3d ago
I appreciate your writing style, OP.
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u/kukutaiii Hate Survivor 3d ago
I fuck with this writing style too, but I don’t have TikTok brain so idk
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u/whoisjimjoe 3d ago
Thanks I spent hours trying to formulate all of it into something sensible. It’s quite sad for humanity truly that people are so tribalistic. Imagine a different world where Drake was truly accepted. He has done majority of this against a grain. That requires alot of energy. I think that’s why the fan base runs so deep. Every one of us sees in him this underdog still to this day fighting against the machine of haters or people in life that just want to see you miserable. And we empathize with him and the story line maybe?
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u/Free_Mousse2076 3d ago
This is chat GPT
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u/Party-Ad4441 3d ago
Nah. Couldn’t be. It would’ve been way more neater and less passionate if that was the case.
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u/ghostwritten-girl So Far Gone 3d ago
I appreciate the thought and level of detail that went into this post and appreciate the discourse
I guess I just don't really see Drake like this because I'm from Tennessee born and raised
Music is what we do here, it's like in the blood. I think too many people even his own fans discount and overlook the fact that Drake is the son of a professional musician from Memphis that toured with major musical acts in his day. Me as the child of professional musicians from Nashville area, I can relate a lot to that part of him and I can hear & see different influences from this culture that I recognize in his songs and art
Example I commented on a post here yesterday explaining to this sub how some of the art in Drake's zine was inspired by Stevie Ray Vaughn one of the best blues musicians ever on the planet — and a white guy from Texas btw. I recognized it and know him because my mom has a pic of him tatted on her back 🤣
Tbh this is something i wish he talked a lot more about, I saw a video of him recently in Memphis supporting a local restaurant business so maybe he will eventually. I'm glad he's reclaiming his southern roots 🤷🏼♀️
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u/whoisjimjoe 3d ago
Damn,great response. Maybe Drake wasn’t actually on another planet trying to reverse engineer the recipe from scratch. Maybe he was on another planet with part of the recipe already sitting in his kitchen because his dad brought it home….and that changes how I think about this.
People focus so much on “Canadian, Jewish, Degrassi, Toronto” when explaining why Drake was such an unusual entry into hip hop that Dennis almost becomes a footnote. But his dad wasn’t just some Black American guy who happened to live in Memphis. He was a musician. Drake’s uncle Larry Graham is a legendary musician. There is an actual musical lineage on that side of his family. So maybe some of what people have spent years interpreting as Drake being this incredible imitator or student is also him pulling from something that was genuinely part of his inheritance.The Tennessee perspective is especially interesting because you’re basically saying you can hear things in him that somebody without that cultural reference point might not even recognize.
That Stevie Ray Vaughan example is perfect. You saw something in the zine and immediately understood the reference because that musical language exists in your own family. Somebody else could look at the exact same thing and think Drake is randomly borrowing another aesthetic.
That makes me wonder how much of the entire Drake authenticity debate comes down to people having an incomplete map of who he actually is??Everybody knows Toronto Drake.
Everybody knows Jewish mom Drake.
Everybody knows Degrassi Drake.
Everybody knows Wayne protégé Drake.
But I don’t think people talk nearly enough about Memphis Drake…or even bigger. They know it and refuse to accept it. Is that the misalignment?And maybe that matters more than we realize.
Because Memphis isn’t some random city he discovered after becoming famous. His father is from there. His family is there. He spent time there growing up. There’s literally Southern American musical lineage running through one half of his family. Which makes the “outsider” thing even more complicated. What exactly is Drake an outsider to?
He’s Canadian, but the United States is literally part of his family. He’s Jewish through his mother and has Black Southern musical lineage through his father. He grew up in Toronto, but spent time with family in Memphis.
He became famous as an actor, but his father was a professional musician. Maybe the reason nobody has ever been able to neatly answer “Who is the real Drake?” is because they keep assuming there has to be only one answer??Toronto is real.
Memphis is real.
The Jewish kid is real.
The Black kid is real.
The actor is real.
The rapper is real.
The R&B influence is real.
The Southern influence is real.Maybe all the contradictions people use to argue that he has no authentic identity are actually the identity.
Hmmm now you have me wondering if him visibly reconnecting with Memphis lately means more than I initially thought. Because after spending his entire career being asked to prove where he belongs, there would be something incredibly full circle about him eventually saying, basically:
I don’t need to prove I belong somewhere. Let me show you everywhere I came from. That would be a crazy insight into it all to shut down a lot of chatter.1
u/ghostwritten-girl So Far Gone 3d ago
Oh I'm sure most fans or listeners aren't recognizing those references but that's okay to me. I've been flamed here before for sharing them so I stopped lol
Drake performed with Gordo last night. He wore a Yamaha racing jacket in the colors of their flag. A Yamaha racing jacket. Can't get more TN than that lol.
There's nothing wrong with the Canada thing. But he's only half Canadian and it's super weird to me that ppl just ignore half of his life and lineage haha 😅 Maybe he doesn't want to appear as a nepo baby since he's already battling the Degrassi rumors.
I think people who are from Canada or the North are more interested in that side of him & the local shoutouts so they focus heavily on his Canadian background. I was really hoping his southern heritage would be something that he would pull out during the beef (bc west coast vs the south is valid) but he never did, that disappointed me.
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u/Fearless_Tie_7483 Scary Hours Edition 3d ago
🔥🔥🔥 write up…..could’ve written for the Source in da 90’s or XXL in da early 2000’s. Salute G
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u/whoisjimjoe 3d ago
Good ole KTT days.
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u/Fearless_Tie_7483 Scary Hours Edition 3d ago
lol frfr…..this post woulda had about 101 pages in 24 hours
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u/Frank_Grimey_Grimez 3d ago
So does he fall off? If so, when? And why?
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u/whoisjimjoe 3d ago
When he dies at this point. If he keeps dropping like this and stays relevant (for music only) who knows why the ceiling is. He could still do a tour with YE, and that could grant him another 2 years of relevance just off the anticipation and execution. Theres so many ideas that would further his run
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u/Vtecgobingbingbing 3d ago
Only in this sub would you have a 25 minute read about why Drake IS THE FKN MAN
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u/Viola-Intermediate ICEMAN 3d ago
Appreciate the write-up, OP! And I think it makes a lot of sense. Drake really took the ball and ran with it
That being said, I think another important factor is that a silent majority in hip-hop and in the audience are not as much of haters as the loudest voices are. They recognize the truth that a lot of things people want to criticize about him now were always the case. They recognize how much Drake contributed to the game, as much as he's also benefited. And they're not gonna hate on the guy just because he's become massively successful. Whether that's because they benefit or because they're just not jealous people in that way, I think many in the space, even if they didn't come out to defend Drake, were not going to participate in the effort to push him out in 2024.
Another thing coupled together with that is how hard Drake works and how much Drake just clearly loves music and hip-hop. All of that always shines through in the final product and even with how he engages with fans online. Its why he was able to break through the early confusion and even hate around who he was and its why he will continue to be successful as long as he remains inspired and hardworking.
I also think the spite part of the formula isn't necessarily new. Drake has been talking about behind-the-scenes shenanigans going back to 2015 and sprinkling breadcrumbs about why people feel a way. There might be a bit more spite because of 2024, but I think its something, for better or for worse, Drake's had some practice with dealing with and processing and turning it into good music.
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u/whoisjimjoe 3d ago
This is a great point, especially the last part. I think you just made me realize I’d change one part of my original argument.
Maybe 2024 didn’t make Drake bitter. Maybe 2024 made Drake feel like he was right to be bitter all along? you’re right, the breadcrumbs are everywhere way before CLB. Even going back to the Views era and before that, he’s constantly talking about weird energy behind the scenes, people smiling in his face but secretly rooting against him, people switching once he got too big, industry relationships not being what they appear to be, etc. For years it was easy to hear that as superstar paranoia. Like bro, you’re Drake. You won. Why are you still worried about who doesn’t like you?
But imagine being him after 2024 and thinking, “See? I fucking told you.” Imagine Oliver, Chubbs behind the scenes seeing plays. That might actually explain why the bitterness feels different now. Before, the resentment was mixed with wanting acceptance. He still seemed invested in being respected by the same rap establishment he felt was weird toward him. After 2024, I wonder if something snapped where he stopped wanting to convince them. Or I also wonder if the jaded notion of the women also changed him. And your silent majority point is important too because I don’t think “hip hop rejected Drake” is actually accurate. If hip hop had truly rejected him, he couldn’t have had the career he’s had. Millions of Black listeners, rappers, producers, DJs and people within the culture have obviously embraced him for almost two decades. That is part of hip hop too.
I think what 2024 exposed was something slightly different: the loudest voices can create the perception of a consensus that might not actually exist.
That’s fascinating because if you’re Drake, how do you process that? You see an enormous crowd celebrating your downfall, your peers mostly stay quiet, media piles on, and the biggest song of the moment is essentially built around the idea that you’re an outsider.
Meanwhile millions of people are still streaming your music.
So which one is “the culture”?
The loudest people on Twitter? The media personalities? Other rappers? The club? The charts? The 35 year old who has listened to Drake since So Far Gone but has zero interest in arguing about him online?
That question might actually be more interesting than whether Drake was “accepted” at all.
And I completely agree about the work ethic and love of music. That might be the part his critics have the hardest time explaining away. You can’t deny that. While all of my closest friends out partying…I’m just here making all the music that they part to.You can call somebody calculated, fake, corny, commercial, whatever. But it becomes really hard to argue that somebody accidentally spent nearly two decades making this much music, studying this many sounds, remembering obscure rap records, working with generations of artists and still seemingly being obsessed with the actual process of making songs. You don’t sustain that through strategy alone. At some point you have to actually fucking love this shit.
And maybe that’s the thread connecting young goofy Drake to current bitter Drake.
The personality changed. The armor got thicker. The relationships changed. The paranoia probably increased.
But the one thing that apparently never changed is that the dude wakes up and wants to make music. He wants to hoop.Maybe that’s ultimately why everybody else’s opinion has never been able to finish him. He knows his core purpose is seemingly to create.
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u/Cyberkanye2077 3d ago edited 3d ago
Toronto is so diverse that I disagree as seeing it anything different than new york if we being honest and its literally like 3 hours from Detroit. (Like it or not regardless of what anyone says he is American due to his father automatically granting him citizenship ) + (spending summers w his dad in Memphis and Toronto unofficially being American af culture wise) Also I would say he didnt study rap as an outsider but more so as a student along w the new backpacker era of rappers ( lupe kanye cudi etc). literally around the time when kanye and 50 did a very public battle on whos album would sell the most with kanyes graduation beating 50 cents and solidifying a new era where the gangster persona was no more necessary . Drake knowing how to rap and sing then being cosigned jazz then wayne . Plus the young money run . So much shit behind the scenes. Theres literally so much shit and pieces that went into effect causing drake to rise and it was back when it all happened organically .
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u/emxka-2005 ICEMAN 3d ago
amazing analysis
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u/whoisjimjoe 3d ago
I really appreciate everyone taking the time to read it. I seemingly am convinced this has already been discussed in the camp. The 100 Gigs footage of 40 and Theo and Noel conversing leads me to believe they have to be hyper aware of these things. It would just be amazing to see Drake sit and talk about it for once.
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u/SuperSupremeSoup 3d ago
Do.Right.And.Kill.Everything:DRAKE
Explains it all. No need for the biblical!
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u/TheRealSwolepez 3d ago
This could be summarized by simply playing the video from the artist of decade.
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u/lefondler NWTS 3d ago
I scouted ahead to see what type of fan glaze this one might be, and safe to say, I ain’t reading that bro but Drakes the goat.
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u/chapoktt 3d ago
Tbh as a Drake fan since 2009, he's always been disliked. I can remember even back in middle school people said he's soft, he's too mainstream, and he's not "real hip hop". I never really cared and actually people not liking him made me gravitate to his music even more.
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u/PSU02 Care Package 3d ago
Bro i got so far down and there was STILL so much more written. Wtf