CELEBRATE VALENTINE’S DAY THE DRAKE WAY.
With the NBA All-Star Game this weekend, Toronto shows it’s finally become the world-class city its leaders have always claimed it is — thanks to Drake
To talk about Toronto’s reputation, much depends on where you sit in relation to the city. To those in the rest of the country, “the centre of the universe” may be comprised of smug workaholics, oblivious that anything of value sits outside its mega-boundaries. Internationally, it’s likely still a certain crack- smoking mayor who first comes to mind.
But even from within, it’s not exactly a compliment to say something is “very Toronto.” This is, after all, the same place that once tore down most of its historic architecture in a fit of modernism, a place that built a freeway next to its greatest natural attribute, the shore of Lake Ontario. In other words, a place that made itself less good in trying to be cutting edge.
The fact that the city’s long-awaited train to the airport is more expensive than splitting a cab is “very Toronto.” That the Toronto Maple Leafs are the least- winning team in the NHL with the highest ticket price is “very Toronto.” Laws that finally allowed food trucks to roam the city but prohibited them from parking within 50 metres of established restaurants and 30 metres of schools or places of worship, also “very Toronto.”
Indeed, Torontonians are almost proud of the city’s deft combination of big- ticket bravado and remarkable bureaucratic incompetence. That’s why it’s so odd for many here to see the city suddenly on the world stage in an earned way, touted, for instance, by the New York Times as one of the Top 10 travel destinations for 2016. (Just six months after the paper skewered the city for its indifference over its own Pan Am Games. Also “very Toronto.”)
Toronto’s global reputation as a pillar of cool is as sudden as it is unexpected — and we only have Drake to thank (or blame).
The apex of this new reality is occurring this weekend, in the form of the NBA All- Star Weekend, which began last night with a celebrity match and continues through to Sunday with an all- star game between actual NBA players. For this event’s first foray across the Canadian border, Drake acted as a coach for Canada’s celebrity team, alongside former NBA star Steve Nash and the Toronto Blue Jays’ Jose Bautista. In addition, on Wednesday Drake began teasing the upcoming release of his long-awaited album Views from the Six — an album that could very well drop as the AllStar Weekend launches. And even if it doesn’t, there’s icing on Drake’s cake: he received the key to the city from Toronto mayor John Tory on Friday.
One can’t help but wonder whether the All- Star Game would even be in Canada without Drake: he’s not just the Toronto Raptors’ global ambassador, but — if his courtside enthusiasm is to be believed — he’s their biggest fan. And outspoken, genuine fandom from the biggest rapper means much more than simply selling tickets.
Drake and Toronto are inexorably linked.
From the beginning of his cultural ascendancy, Drake has gone beyond putting Toronto on the map. His music is peppered with geographic references to the city, so much so that in late 2015 Pitchfork put together a guide to the city, as mediated through Drake. That story included an annotated map of the city, with close to two dozen pins dropped at every intersection — from Scarborough to the airport — that Drake has ever referenced in song.
Just a few examples: on “Connect,” from Nothing Was the Same, Drake maps his route from his mother’s Forest Hill home to Scarborough: “I take Eglinton to 401 east/ And exit at Markham Road in the east end”; on “You & The 6,” from last year’s If You’re Reading This it’s Too Late, Drake addresses his mother directly, asking, “Do you remember back to Weston Road, Scarlett Road?” — a nod to his early upbringing in a tougher part of town. Drake also fre- quently shouts out to 15 Fort York, the downtown address of his producer Noah “40” Shebib where he recorded his first album. To say nothing of the fact that Drake has bestowed upon the city a new nickname, The Six (for its two area codes, 416 and 647), and declared himself The 6 God.
The city remains central to Drake’s personal mythology because he’s chosen to avoid, as he says on You & The 6, “making stories up about where I’m actually from.” Far from it: in shouting out and talking up the city of Toronto — in his lyrics, as the Raptors’ global ambassador, by using it as a place-setting for a number of his music videos, with viral marketing campaigns hung at Billy Bishop airport and over the 401 — Drake has done the near- unthinkable for Hogtown: he’s positioned it squarely in the spotlight, and made the attention seem deserved.
“For Drake, Toronto is more than a hometown. It’s a battleground, a kingdom, something worth fighting for and celebrating,” Pitchfork writer Jamieson Cox observed. “No other MC has ever attempted to play tourism director on such a grand scale for Toronto.”
Part of that affinity could be because Drake and Toronto are analogous, with talent, ambition and potential that doesn’t fit into a pre- existing framework of what it means to be good at your game. So where Drake doesn’t fit the conventional parameters of what gives a rapper cred — he’s a bit soft, a bit goofy, with a relatively happy upbringing in an affluent suburb and a role on a kids’ TV show — so too does Toronto come up short on the traditional checklist of what makes a great city: a love of historical buildings, say, or more than three (mostly) functioning subway lines.
Drake could have acted tough and made up stories about where he’s from, but mythmaking would have served him less well in the long-term than owning what he brings to the table. “Maybe because I had friends who grew up in the hood, I could have acted like I had, too,” he told GQ in 2013 — “and perpetrated a different lifestyle, and it would be eating away at me because it wouldn’t be the truth.” Likewise, Toronto has only ever fallen short when it looks to mimic the successes of other cities rather than accepting its idiosyncrasies and coming into its own. ( LRT could work, for instance, but it’s simply too late for more subways.)
It’s sort of perfect, really, that a musician whose stated goal is to defy the expectations levied onto himself as a hip-hop artist would be from Toronto, because Toronto, by virtue of its newness and therefore by virtue of necessity, has had to redraw the parameters of what it means to be a world-class city in order to qualify as one. So if Paris has history and New York has size, but we have neither, then diversity is — and always has been — our unique strength, and strongest selling point.
Drake’s celebration of Toronto is well, very Toronto, in that his appreciation and boastfulness about where he’s from comes wrapped up in the sort of self-aware humility and humour you’d expect from someone from Toronto — or anywhere in Canada, for that matter: We The North as a rallying cry, not a call to arms.
That cry will surely ring out all weekend. For the next few days, AllStar delegates will find more worldclass restaurants, upscale hotels and unparalleled nightlife destinations — including Sher, Drake’s VIP lounge at the Air Canada Centre, and Fring’s, the restaurant he just opened with Susur Lee — in Toronto at which to cheer and celebrate than ever before. Because while Drake has been busy getting the world excited about Toronto, Toronto has been getting ready for the right moment to host the world. Let’s all just hope the subway stays running.