As Mike Skinner explains in his guardian.co.uk/music takeover video, Drake is one of his favourite MCs. That's why he asked Ben Thompson to dissect the Canadian rapper's genius
The first time I experienced Drake, it was as an absence. Cough-syrup laureate Lil Wayne was making a rare UK appearance at Hammersmith Apollo, and his smooth-talking Young Money protege was meant to be the support act.
Whatever the perfectly valid-sounding excuse for Drake's no-show in October 2009 ? it might have been his highly publicised anterior cruciate ligament injury, it might have been his mother having an operation ? this turned out to be the first of a series of planned London debuts that failed to materialise.
Drake's pre-rap provenance as the long-time star of clean-cut teen TV show Degrassi: The Next Generation seemed to mark him out as a potential Will Smith. His slightly embarrassing nickname (he's Drizzy to his mentor's Weezy) was the call-sign of a Lil Wayne mini-me. And his reasons for not fulfilling eagerly anticipated dates were conspiring to get him branded "K.West lite" (Kanye had a life?threatening car crash, then his mother's tragic death; Drake had the kind of annoying ankle injury England players get just before a World Cup, and a mum with really bad arthritis).
So how come when the DJ (probably Tim Westwood, as he still gets those gigs when Reggie Yates is not available) played a track off Drake's EP So Far Gone just before Lil Wayne came on, the place went as nutty as at any point in the ? thoroughly entertaining ? headline show that followed? Because the blithely mixed (in terms of both gender and ethnicity) and entirely up-for-it crowd had already grasped the nub of the issue ? which is that the cynicism and enervation that Drake's backstory tends to inspire in the unconverted are exactly the moods that his music subtly and gleefully conspires to banish.
How is it possible ? sceptics wondered ? that an album with the dubious distinction of being heralded as the best record of 2009 by both Florence (of and the Machine infamy) and N-Dubz's prophet of street wisdom Dappy could actually be any good? Because ? as the most cursory listen to the US No 1 single The Best I Ever Had will tell you ? life's possibilities are, if not actually infinite, then at least so inspiringly numerous that even the seemingly improbable eventuality of Florence and Dappy being right about the same thing cannot be entirely discounted.
Factor in the still more unlikely phenomenon of an MTV making-of-the-album documentary that contains a series of personal revelations, and the fairytale element of the Drake story comes through even more clearly. Somewhere between the cancellation of his July 2010 UK mini-tour and the release of his splendidly metaphysical in-celebration-of-girls-getting-ready-to-go-out single Fancy ("Time heals all/ Heels hurt to walk in"), the TV station that usually brings us Jersey Shore screened the as-it-turned-out-appositely-titled Better Than Good Enough.
Alongside the intriguing admission that Drake only ever writes lyrics on a Blackberry (which seems to go at least some way to explaining his music's paradoxical quality of miasmic containment), this unexpectedly compelling full-length promo segment supplied a wealth of other significant biographical detail. As well as poignant interviews with his best friend, producer and consigliere Noah "40" Shebib, whose struggle with multiple sclerosis has cast a lengthening shadow over the success they've both worked so hard for, the film shed much light on the complex and fragmented family situation that is the subject of many of Drake's most strikingly acute lyrics.
In Fireworks, the opening track on last year's million-selling debut album Thank Me Later, Drake follows up a reference to an upsetting conversation with his dad with the verse: "Me and my realtor we built up a better rapport/ Got my mother in a place with some better decor/ She searched the entire city, I let her explore/ Now she says she's lonelier than ever before." If the essence of rap is storytelling through rhyme ? which it is ? then it would be hard to come up with a more succinct demonstration of how much emotional information a skilled practitioner can compress into just a handful of lines. And the distance between Drake's pampered day-to-day reality and hip-hop's perennially embattled urban heartland makes his knack for dancing across that yawning chasm more impressive, not less.
There's another line in Fireworks that compresses the truth of his familial situation into an even more economical couplet: "I want to witness love, I've never seen it close." At one point in Better Than Good Enough, Drake says the goal of his music is to provide listeners with the tenderness his mother never got from his dad ? not the kind of confession you'd expect from Gucci Mane. And the conflicting pulls on his filial loyalties are made painfully clear by the film's eloquently contrasting footage of the ailing but resilient Canadian-Jewish mum who christened him Aubrey (Drake is his middle name) and then brought him up in suburban Toronto, and the raffish Memphis-based musician dad who once drummed for Jerry Lee Lewis and now flirts with Drake's entourage.
The attempt to bridge seemingly unbridgeable divides ? between being black and jewish, his mum and dad, singing and rapping, Toronto and Memphis ? is one obvious starting point for Drake's musical quest. And while his real-life surname ? Graham ? ties him to a major African-American musical dynasty (his uncle was the great funk bassist Larry Graham, once of Sly and the Family Stone), there's tension in this connection as well as reassurance.
The woozy, saturated atmosphere of Thank Me Later confirms Drake as one of the few people, alongside Kanye West and James Blake (one of two British artists ? the other being Jamie of the xx ? Drake is rumoured to have worked with recently) to fully encompass the grand new vistas of hip-hop introspection opened up by the former's landmark 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak. Yet last month, when he finally made it on to the Hammersmith Apollo stage, even some of those diehard female fans who'd been beguiled by Best I Ever Had's ambitious pledge to "make your pussy whistle like the Andy Griffiths theme song" found themselves blanching slightly at a physical demonstration of that aspect of the diminutive rapper's sexual repertoire which he egotistically and somewhat off-puttingly billed as "the Drake triple-thrust".
At times like these, Drake sometimes seems to be trying too hard to compensate for his lack of gangsta credentials with bravura displays of priapic overconfidence. Just because you're named after a male duck, that is no reason to act like one. It's honesty that's his best defence, not ersatz machismo. And when he lets his music do the talking ? from the exquisite, Gatsby-esque languour of Houstatlantavegas and Successful's irresistibly insidious internal monologue, through the candy-floss flavoured bubble-bath of Karaoke to the defiant self-justification of Over ? he is utterly persuasive.
"I'm living inside a moment, not taking pictures to save it," Drake observes, in the middle of the sumptuously elegiac The Resistance, as a couple of thousand hands raise their cameraphones. But later on in the same song, he's berating himself for not caring enough about his gran ("I heard they just moved my grandmother to a nursing home/ And I be acting like I don't know how to work a phone/ But hit redial you'll see that I just called/ Some chick I met at the mall/ That I barely know at all"). He's up there on a tightrope stretched between heedlessness and self-examination, and no one else walks it better.
It's hard to remember what it was about Thank Me Later that felt slightly disappointing when it first came out, because it sounds like a greatest hits album now. Hip-hop was always supposed to be about turning negatives into positives, and Drake has taken mainstream rap's bloated sense of entitlement and turned it into an amazing work of art.
Looking at the merchandise stall on the way out of Hammersmith Apollo ? �50 seems like a lot of money for a sweatshirt, but there are some nice Drake shopping bags for a tenner. And if that's not the perfect souvenir of a night out with a true poet of conspicuous consumption, I don't know what would be.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/feb/07/streets-takeover-charting-drakes-progress
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