When the Canadian rapper-cum-R&B crooner Drake
bounded onstage last month, he was greeted with a hail of applause as
well as an eerie cathode blue glow that quickly settled over the 2,300
capacity auditorium — the side effect of hundreds of camera phones
aimed and at the ready for Drake’s high-energy opening number, “Forever
“Last name: ‘Ever.’ First name: ‘Greatest’/ Like a
sprained ankle, boy — I ain’t nuttin’ to play with’,” went Drake’s
opening couplet, the audience shouting along, fists aloft, with his
every word.
About a third of the way through the set, though,
Drake impressed the exuberant cross-section of sneakerheads and hoochie
mamas, bloggers and music industry honchos by sending a heartfelt
shout-out to L.A. “This is the most important show on this tour for
me,” Drake said between songs. “The most important show I’ma do.”
Which is a curious thing for any MC with a
substantial coast-to-coast fan base to say, let alone one whose “Away
From Home” world tour will take him to such hip-hop hotbeds as
“I knew word would get back from here to everybody
I’ve worked with, probably everybody I have ever idolized,” he said,
snuggling beneath a fur blanket, clearly fatigued. “People were coming
out like, ‘Alright, here’s your shot here in
The artist also known as “Drizzy” had grown somewhat
accustomed to the relentless pace of life on the road. But will he be
able to cope with every vagary of nascent rap stardom?
After a relatively meteoric rise from hip-hop
anonymity, scoring two Top 10 hits off a self-released mix-tape “So Far
Gone,” snagging two Grammy nominations last year and triggering a major
label bidding war (which resulted in a legendarily lucrative deal with
Aspire/
who’s currently serving a one-year prison sentence. Drizzy Drake is the
genre’s go-to guy for a quick hit who’s getting tapped to collaborate
with the platinum-plus likes of Eminem,
Still, the arrival of Drake’s debut album “Thank Me
Later” this week as one of 2010’s most anticipated CDs marks a new
stage in his career; call it his grand unveiling after nearly a year
and a half of relentless hype. And Drake owned up to feeling a certain
obligation to deliver.
“A lot of people are treating this not like it’s my
first album — but like it’s my last album,” he said. “It could be my
last if it’s not that great. That’s where the pressure comes from:
people thinking I won’t have another chance.”
In an era when album sales are hitting lows not
registered since the early ’70s and the urban music world in particular
remains more fixated on racking up ring-tone sales than nurturing an
artist’s longevity, the accepted wisdom remains that it is easier to
build an audience for a new performer than to create loyalty among
listeners.
In the view of XXL magazine senior editor
Drake is “the No. 1 draft pick, a legitimate career player” in hip-hop
right now. But at this cultural tipping point — when the idea of an
artist shifting more than a million copies in first week sales seems to
belong to a bygone era — Meadows-Ingram feels the metric of success for
“Thank Me Later” will be something other than the bottom line.
“He’s able to enter the market at a time when people
have a diminished expectations,” said Meadows-Ingram. “There is no
benchmark for what success is. And if you can’t judge it on sales
alone, you have to ask, ‘Did the album artistically perform the way you
wanted it to?'”
Considered within that context, Drake’s career so
far has been a triumph of profile management and controlled bursts of
envelope pushing. The half-Jewish,
effectively transcended his earlier, not inconsiderable renown as a TV
star — he portrayed “Jimmy,” a wheelchair-bound high school lothario
from 2001 to ’08 on the popular Canadian teen drama “DeGrassi: The Next
Generation” (which also airs in the U.S.) — to construct an alternate
persona as a hip-hop star.
“I’m just grateful (that) I’m not just the kid off
‘DeGrassi’ anymore,” he said. “Everybody on ‘DeGrassi,’ the producers,
made us feel ‘DeGrassi’ was the biggest thing we would ever do in our
lives, like that was the end of the road for all of us.”
From there, musical success followed in short order: rap rainmaker
credibility and currency an immeasurable boost. Then Drake
self-distributed the epochal mixtape EP “So Far Gone,” that sold
hundreds of thousands of iTunes downloads and yielded the single “Best
I Ever Had.” It topped the R&B/Hip-hop chart for seven weeks,
helping to spark a major label bidding war and paving the way for a
nationwide tour.
Musically, on many of his most memorable songs
(“Successful “Over Drake articulates a mixture of lyrical braggodocio
and material disillusionment that seems somehow poignant at a time of
global recession — when hip-hop seems to be going through a pronounced
soul searching phase. Meanwhile, he stands out from the rest of the
current freshman pack (B.o.B., Kid Cudi, Wale, et al) by blending
no-nonsense rapping (that owes a conscious debt to
Viewed another way, Drake fits into a continuum of rap debutantes that includes West and Queens hardcore MC
who similarly generated a deafening hive of buzz before either of their
debut albums came out. Although the jury is still out on Drake’s
ability to grab hip-hop’s brass ring like those MCs.
“Hip-hop is all about moments,” said Drake. “You
look at people who were hot three or four years ago who are sitting
around reminiscing. It’s fickle. It’s a game of moments. I’m the moment
right now.”
Recording for “Thank Me Later” began in October
after the rapper tore ligaments in his knee during a performance. He
laid down tracks in
venerable NightBird Recording Studios. Of the album’s 14 cuts, half
include high-profile collabos with a murderer’s row of hitmakers: Jay-Z
(“Light Up”) and
Drake terms his first out-and-out mainstream effort, “Find Your Love.”
“I didn’t go the safe route,” Drake said. “I could
have put somebody on every song I don’t want people to be able to say,
‘He got so much assistance on this album and didn’t work hard enough.'”
In fact, to hear it from the rapper — who, in
conversation, demonstrates flashes of boyishness, the outsize ego of a
rap-R&B big shot and the courtliness of a Southern gent, but who
overwhelmingly comes off as a reasonable dude — the central operating
principal was to push creative boundaries. I.E. deploying slow jams,
R&B hooks, a certain borderline melancholy and melody choices that
fall decidely outside what has passed for mainstream until now. Hence,
the album title “Thank Me Later.” As in: “I think it’s going to take
people a while to get it,” Drake said. “Every song, you want to take a
deep breath afterward.”
While a critical mass of MCs these days — from LL Cool J, to Common to
TV, Drake is for now content to remain in the musical realm and keep
acting on the back burner; he’s even stopped referring to himself as
“the new version of the Fresh Prince.”
Already musing about calling his second album
“Moments,” Drake directly contradicted the opening verse of “Forever”
(see this story’s third paragraph) to address his current position
within hip-hop and look toward the future.
“I don’t feel like I’m a great rapper right now,” he
said, rubbing his forehead and stifling a yawn. “I feel I’m good at
what I do. But I want to be — if not the best — I want to reach my
personal best. I just want to be better, man. That’s all.”
———
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
