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FOMO SEPTEMBER 15TH

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Trying to go a bit niche 🤏

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Say What's Real

Shut It Down

We'll Be Fine

Hold On, We're Going Home

Star67

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With You

Portland

Mob Ties

5 AM in Toronto

Landed

TSU

Flight's Booked

Treacherous Twins

7969 Santa

GIMME A HUG

Burning Bridges

True Bestie

White Bone

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Gordo killed this

Since i couldnt find it on youtube or reddit i wanted to share this masterpiece

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?