I remember listening to a song on the car radio years ago. The singer was rapping. His accent was familiar. His voice was deep and nasal. No southern drawl. No British charm. No LA rhythm. He sounded kind of dumb. He sounded just like us.
“That guy’s from Toronto,” I said “Yeah, it’s Drake,” my wife said and rolled her eyes.
Drake always repped Toronto. Showing the city, Degrassi and the Raptors in his videos. He never hid his Torontonianess. But then something started changing. Drake started creating a new persona.
I don’t blame him. He’s an artist and he was playing with his sound and his image to expand his audience. But the game ended abruptly when Kendrick Lamar came out with his award-winning diss hit on Drake, Not Like Us.
Drake didn’t grow up spray-painting subway cars in New York or running with the Crips in Compton. He’s just a kid raised by a single mom who lived in a basement in the Midtown and attended Vaughan Road Academy. Kendrick is right. He isn’t like them.
He’s like us.
And he made it big. So big, he helped Kendrick rise from the streets of Compton to the very top of his game. Drake didn’t lose me when Kendrick destroyed his street cred with his masterpiece diss.
Drake lost me when he ignored the kids at his former high school at Vaughan Road Academy who tweeted at him, pleading for his help to stop the closure of their school back in 2016. I didn’t understand why he never responded to them. I mean Drake wore a Vaughan Road Academy sweatshirt in a Nike Superbowl commercial that same year.
Kendrick helped me understand.
Drake ignored the kids, because if he did tweet back at them, his “false street cred” as Kendrick calls it, would have been questioned.
Drake lost in his rapper duel with Kendrick. And he also lost the plot. He may be the “God of the six” but he’s not the king of rap. Actual kings of rap like Kendrick and Tupac are poets of a hard life lived in the U.S.
Drake doesn’t come from that, but what he lived isn’t less real. His reality is connected to those kids at Vaughan Road Academy. It’s time for Drake to keep it Canadian, like Lil Wayne once told him.
