The distressed hip-hop head
22 without a clue on how to take a stand?”
Like Drake’s March 14, the song is bristling with emotion and a fear that seems to ask: How could I have been so reckless and what kind of father will I be to my child?
In a column on parenthood, The Guardian columnist Tim Lott described first-time fatherhood as a bonfire of the vanities. Fatherhood, he asserts, “puts an end to a particular male narrative that [men] can somehow be free, adventurous and an enduring focus” of the opposite sex’s attention.
Of course, women have always known this and have gone on with the often unglamorous work of parenting and shelving their careers for the sake of their children. Drake, on the other hand, reveals just how easy it is for life to go on after becoming a father. The rapper says that he’s seen his child only once while he continues to perform to sold-out shows and attempting to see his kid “a few times”.
This isn’t how it always is, though. Fatherhood is many contradictory things: complicated, mundane, terrifying, life-affirming and full of joy.
When my son was born late last year, I walked down the hospital’s corridors humming Jay Z and Kanye West’s New Day. In the second verse, Jay Z raps: “Took me 26 years to find my path/ My only job is to cut the time in half.”
An hour later, the sun was spilling through the hospital blinds and I was holding my son in my arms for the first time.
In the 26 years I’d been alive, I felt, for the first time, as if my heart was going to explode with a mixture of panic, love, fear and uncertainty.
In some respects, Drake’s story is a kind of universal story of fatherhood because it’s largely a tale of cowardice. Because, while Drake pontificates about whether he has the mettle to be a father, Sophie Brusseaux, his son’s mother, has quietly gone on with the work of parenting.
Similarly, whenever I find myself harping on about how I’d be a better father if only I had more money, time and experience, my partner is quick to remind me that the real work of parenthood is in the dayto-day work of being present, and bored — carrying out the menial tasks that never make it to the Instagram feed (changing nappies, tending to our sick child, putting him to bed).
A few days after first listening to March 14, I played The Game’s Like Father Like Son on repeat for about an hour. The song’s chorus, performed by Busta Rhymes, expresses how The Game hopes his son grows up to live a life that isn’t determined by his father’s mistakes.
“I hope you grow up to become that everything you can be/ That’s all I wanted for you young’n, like father, like son/ But in the end I hope you only turn out better than me/ I hope you know I love you young’n, like father, like son/ My little man, your day is coming/ Coming, your day is coming/ I tell ya, and when it comes, just keep it running/ Running, just keep it running, I tell you.”
Listening to this song and to Drake’s reckoning with fatherhood, I can’t help but hope my own son’s view of fatherhood won’t be skewed by the actions I take.
We live on hope.