Aubrey Graham for mayor
When Drake slides into his OVO Fest this weekend, he can legitimately call himself the biggest pop star on the planet. What can he possibly do for an encore?
Drake’s annual OVO Fest has always been an opportunity for the rapper to take a victory lap before a hometown crowd, inviting as many A-list guests as he can corral along for the ride to give his Toronto fans a little extra thrill and his ego a little extra “look at me now” stroke.
This time around, Drake is letting Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa kick off OVO Fest on Friday at the Molson Amphitheatre before he rides in, no doubt with myriad superstar friends in tow, for back-to-back local stops on his Summer Sixteen tour at the Air Canada Centre on Sunday and Monday.
If Drake has ever deserved to take a victory lap, it’s now. The guy is having an enviable year, to put it mildly — and we wonder how he could possibly top it.
He logged his second million-selling album in two years within a week of VIEWS release this past April, an impressive achievement considering that only Adele, Taylor Swift and Disney’s Frozen soundtrack — along with Drake’s 2015 “mixtape” If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, of course — have managed to reach that benchmark in the past three years.
And VIEWS, which currently stands at 1.3 million copies, moved south of the border and 80,000-plus here in Canada, just keeps steamin’ along. It was briefly knocked out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 200 after an initial six-week run by the new Blink 182 album, but one week later it was back on top and has remained there ever since — for 11 weeks now, which is precisely how long Swift’s 1989 reigned atop the chart in early 2015.
The infectiously bouncy VIEWShit “One Dance,” meanwhile, was only just knocked out of No. 1 by Sia’s “Cheap Thrills” on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart.
It was not only the first No. 1 of Drake’s career, but its 10 weeks in the top spot also mark it as the longestserving yet this year.
Drake has now spent 45 consecutive weeks in the Billboard Top 10, dating back to when “Hotline Bling” edged up to No. 9 on Oct. 3, 2015, a feat matched amongst male artists only by his Toronto homeboy The Weeknd, whose career he helped launch.
Across the pond, “One Dance” is the longest-running U.K. No. 1 in 22 years, prompting the Guardian to dryly remark a couple of weeks ago that “theoretically, ‘One Dance’ could be No. 1 for all eternity.”
As the Independent noted: “The song now joins the ranks of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ Wet Wet Wet’s ‘Love is All Around,’ Bryan Adams’s song ‘Everything I Do (I Do It For You)’ and Frankie Lane’s ‘I Believe’ to enter the top five longestrunning No. 1 singles in UK chart history.”
So, yeah, Drake’s time is now. OVO Fest this weekend will indeed be a victory lap.
But let’s not forget it was only a year ago that the celebration was tainted by a shooting at its Muzik nightclub after-party, which left two people dead and three injured. It was arguably a career low for Drake.
Today, however, Aubrey Drake Graham can legitimately lay claim to being the biggest pop star on the planet. He is as ubiquitous as it gets — particularly here in Toronto, where you can’t walk a block without hearing something from VIEWS trickling out of a café or a passing car window or the set of ear buds in the seat next to you on the streetcar. He might as well be mayor.
He’s the biggest thing to happen to this city since the Blue Jays won their back-to-back World Series titles, and his pride in being from Toronto has, in turn, positioned him as a source of pride for Toronto. What happens next, though? Where do you go from here, when you’ve conquered the western world at 29? How can it last? Surely, the backlash is coming. Even Taylor Swift’s tenure as America’s Sweetheart seems to finally be wobbling a little bit; Drake’s day will eventually come, too. Pop stardom is a fickle thing.
Drake fussed over VIEWS for so long that it’s clear he intended the album to be his magnum opus, his grand statement. Now that the album has achieved all the success he could have hoped for, it’s going to be hard, psychologically as well as artistically and commercially, to live up to it.
Drake would do well to come back with a quick-’n’-dirty followup akin to the rough-around-the-edges If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, but given how overcooked VIEWS wound up being, he could very well disappear into the studio for five years and come back with the hiphop version of Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile — a meticulous, nothing-leftto-chance monster that sounds impeccable and expensive but isn’t very much fun to listen to.
As a former child actor, he could also easily make the leap to movies, but then he’s just one poorly chosen role, one Shanghai Surprise away from pushing the public to the precipice of “had enough.” Who knows? Drake can do anything he wants right now, and he’s done everything right so far. It’s not like he’ll starve when the public decides to anoint a new King of Pop.
But kings of pop do come and go, so take that OVO Fest victory lap this weekend, Mr. Graham. You’ve earned the right.