“I started getting the straight cookie cutter treatments,” he says. “The pretty boy, lovey-dovey shit that everybody wanted me to do.” The Toronto accent is an extreme north version of flat Midwestern twang, sprinkled with Jamaican patois. In Drake’s case, it’s mediated by a soft Southern cadence picked up from his Memphis cousins. It balances out in the middle somewhere, and if you didn’t know different, he could easily be from Detroit or Chicago. “I was just like, Man, let’s do Kanye’s video,” he says. “Some crazy shit that could potentially offend people. Let’s just fall out of this pattern of doing everything that everyone wants.” Despite the nonchalance, it’s the first inkling I get that his identity crisis is not so much a question about what makes him tick as a potential answer. The bait-and-switch of the video seems like a slo-mo version of a tactic he employs often in conversation and even in song, as when he raps, “I’m the next to blow…pause.” He’s always going out on a limb and then skewering himself before anyone else can, just to let you know that he could son himself more skillfully than you ever could—that he has the lyrical teeth to skewer you if you mistake introspection for weakness.
No comments:
Post a Comment