OVO show celebrates Toronto — and pop’s biggest star
Drake
(out of 4) Aug. 7 at the Budweiser Stage.
Nelly. That’s how far this Drake thing has come. Nelly is up for reappraisal.
Time was, Drake’s annual OVO festival was an opportunity to show off how high his star his risen, a chance to parade a plethora of superstar pals — Jay Z, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Stevie Wonder, Rihanna et al. — across a hometown stage as evidence that October’s Very Own had definitely made it.
These days, it’s just a given that Aubrey Drake Graham is the biggest pop star in the world.
So during the eighth instalment of OVO at the lake- side Budweiser Stage on Monday night, the emphasis was less on wowing the faithful with high-profile cameos from the elder hip-hop A-list and more on putting the Drake brand’s stamp of approval on a coterie of next-gen hitmakers — Rae Sremmurd, Migos, French Montana, Travis Scott, Playboi Carti, Cardi B, Baka Not Nice, PartyNextDoor — while at the same time giving a fond leg up to a rap ancestor fishing for a comeback in the form of an uproariously received late-set appearance by none other than once inescapable, lately considerably less so St. Louis rhymesmith Nelly.
“Nelly, man. Nelly was the highlight,” gushed my neighbour on the lawn as the lights went up at the end of the night, uttering what was officially the absolute last statement I’d expected to hear heading into the show. Then again, absolutely no one had expected to hear Nelly enthusiastically busting out such indelible turn-of-the-millennium singsong singles as “E.I.” or “Hot In Herre” or “Ride Wit Me” with Drake’s doting endorsement heading into the show, either, so points to Drizzy for still knowing how to throw his audience a curveball eight years into the whole OVO thing. Programmatic OVO ain’t.
OVO has always been about Drake throwing his hometown Toronto fans a celebratory party that he himself might enjoy attending, and Monday’s bash — which also featured curt sets by OVO Sound labelmates Roy Woods, dvsn and Masjid Jordan, all of them locals, on the undercard — was buoyed along by its proud host’s evident glee at parading so much au courant talent across the stage.
“This is my favourite night of the year,” Drake proclaimed at one point, and you believed him. The dude did lay out what must have been an obscene amount of cash to have an enormous CN Tower replica — upon which, naturally, he first appeared to the strains of “Free Smoke” seated with legs dangling over the edge of the pod in homage to the cover of last year’s album VIEWS — onstage for the duration, after all.
Toronto boosterism doesn’t get much more committed than that, and Drake had to concede that getting such a gargantuan, occasionally firework-spewing prop built to order proved a daunting task even for him.
“I called 19 companies to build me a CN Tower and they all said ‘no,’ and then I called the 20th!” he laughed midway through the show. No one in attendance, it’s safe to say, would argue that the extravagance wasn’t worth it. You had to see the thing to believe it. True, Monday’s OVO show as a whole often felt like a particularly lavish night of karaoke, with a noticeable prevalence of AutoTuned vocals emanating from the PA throughout the evening and pointing up the deepening rut in which much of the gauzy post-Drake hip-hop/R&B going around at the moment finds itself. Drake himself was such a cursory presence amidst the fray, too, that he actually might have peaked early when “Know Yourself” ushered in a truly bonkers crowd singalong to the phrase “I was running through the 6 with my woes” a mere three or four tunes in.
At least in terms of Drake doing Drake solo, anyway. After that, he rather graciously let the focus shift to the many friends he’d invited out for the evening — including would-be Toronto hip-hop arch-enemy Tory Lanez, with whom he shared an embrace and an onstage burying of public “beef” early in the evening and, at the end of the night, his fresh-from-Osheaga rival in the “biggest Toronto pop star” department, The Weeknd.
Unsurprisingly, the subsequent Drake/Weeknd/OVO/XO summit on the thrumming “Crew Love” had the sold-out crowd veritably foaming at the mouth by the time it was done. And why not? These two guys pretty much own the charts right now all over the world and, yep, they’re from right here in The 6.
If ever Toronto, “the greatest city in the world” according to Drake, had an excuse to show itself a little love, this was it.