Drake turns 30
At 30, the Toronto rapper is on top of his game. But how much longer can Drake keep being Drake?
Drake turns 30 on Monday. That’s a major milestone for anyone. For the first time, you are closer to 40 than 18, which is like having your right foot on the dock as your left foot, still in the canoe, starts to drift the other way. Time is a perpetual ripple in your 20s. It is silent. But in your 30s, the biological and social clocks tick in Dolby Surround. Pings that seemed like distant echoes at 20 — establishing a career, finding love, building a nest egg — can thunder a decade later when living for the moment gives way to worrying about the future. That is, unless you are Aubrey Drake Graham. Drake hatched his long-term goals during a short burst of adolescence. TV star to rapper to cultural live wire. This was the game plan since puberty. He didn’t just follow his dreams — he kidnapped his dreams, locked them in a cage and dared them to escape. The net result is that while most people arrive at the Big 3-0 with an active To-Do list, there’s not much more Drake needs to do, not unless he plans to colonize Mars or start his own YOLO religion.
So the question becomes: what does Drake want to do in his 30s? And given his views on aging and hip hop, is he one day closer to leaving the rap game?
“Rapping is about being young and doing your thing and being fly,” he told Complex in 2011, repeating the sentiment to GQ the next year: “Rap now is just being young and fly and having your s--- together. The mood of rap has changed.”
What Drake didn’t say is that he, more than most, helped change the mood.
He smudged the dots between R&B and rap, opening up new market chambers for artists like Frank Ocean and The Weeknd. With a reverence for melody, and a knack for exhuming new flows, the evolution of Drake from his aptly named first mixtape, Room for Improvement (2006), to this year’s studio blockbuster, Views, reveals a pathological quest to stay ahead of the curve.
But when you’re hailed as “the voice of a generation” — when your lyrics and neologisms and refurbished acronyms spread like viral contagions inside clubs and college campuses — innovation can have a downside.
Drake has spent his 20s rhyming himself into an ageist corner. Unlike previous generations of rappers, who railed against social injustice or spit out bars to chest-thump their hardscrabble pasts, Drake has no broader grievances. Forest Hill is not Compton. Drake is not hood.
He is most comfortable writing about Drake and, specifically, how Drake feels. From love to breakups, failures to triumphs, loyalty to betrayal, insults to boasts, vulnerability to confidence, the language is self-actualized.
Drake is introspective by nature and confessional by design.
It’s a creative lunge for the universal: This is how I feel. Is it how you feel?
And with each passing year, the answer is more likely to be “not really.”
“I don’t know how long I necessarily want to make rap music,” Drake told i-D magazine. “There are artists that are 35 and up, you know, that still make rap and it still works for them. I don’t know if I’ll be that guy. A lot of my music is about being young and figuring it all out. So I don’t know if I can still make my brand of music when I’m up there.”
It’s the same reason Metamucil struggles to reach millennials or why the words “baby boomer” are impossible to find inside Snapchat headquarters. When Drake says, “My whole life is about chasing what’s next,” he’s assuming his audience will never stop caring about what’s next. But what happens when observations such as “I had to let go of us to show myself what I could do / And that just didn’t sit right with you” elicit more eye rolls than nods? What happens when those who grew up with you grow up and suddenly think, “Come on, Drake. Grow up.”
Brags such as “And my house is the definition / Of alcohol and weed addiction” lose demographic lustre when a listener is suddenly preoccupied with first-time mortgage rates. Lifestyle swaggers such as “My n----s still hit the club when it’s 20 below / Who you think runnin’ this show?” fizzle when a listener has a big meeting the next morning.
Hip hop, as practised by Drake, is primarily for the young and the footloose. He’s sharing his life for commercial purposes while working in a fantasyland where patrons still get carded and hedonism is the yin to the yang of emotional chaos. This is tough to sustain. There is nothing young and fly about rhyming couplets that reference Peg Perego infant seats in the back of a Bugatti Royale. No diss track should ever be conceived while a rapper is sprawled on his side for an annual prostate exam.
This is Drake’s dilemma in the shadow of 30.
To appreciate just how ridiculous rappers can sound when their aging domestic identities collide with their studio personas, consider an Access Hollywood headline from Thursday: “Kanye West Is Mad His Kids Haven’t Had A Playdate with Beyoncé & Jay Z’s Daughter.”
That’s not where Drake wants to end up.
Since landing a role on Degrassi: The Next Generation in 2001, Drake has strived to be at the vanguard of his generation. He acted by day and stayed up all night working on his music, as if trying to beat a phantom deadline.
But his prolific output as a rapper — four studio albums, five mixtapes, more than 70 singles, 36 videos — suggests the expiration date is real, at least in his mind. As he raps in “Weston Road Flows” on Views: “The most successful rapper 35 and under / That’s when I plan to retire, man it’s already funded.”
Those caged dreams never did escape. They multiplied in captivity. Now they begin a new decade. “I just want to be a time-marker for my generation,” Drake told The Fader last year.
He did this as a rapper in his 20s. How he does it in his 30s remains to be seen.
But for Drake, something always comes next. vmenon@thestar.ca