Music: Drake, the Next Generation

Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here.

Is the Toronto rapper the saviour of hip hop?

In a hotly debated 2009 piece, New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones argued that hip hop’s best days were behind it. The most popular record of the year, Jay Z’s The Blueprint 3, was undeniably boring—a parade of punch-less punchlines and celebrity cameos—and Lil Wayne, the strangest, most talented rapper going, had released an album of godawful guitar rock. Rappers were still selling albums (to the extent that anybody was), but the genre seemed tired. Frere-Jones speculated that, after twenty years of pop-culture dominance, hip hop had run its course. It wouldn’t disappear completely—genres don’t do that—but it would lose its perch at the apex of the pyramid.

At the time, there was one artist who seemed to be on the up and up, although not everybody believed that he had staying power. Frere-Jones dismissed him as “the young rapper of the moment, the genial and deft Drake.” The message was clear: geniality and deftness weren’t going to rescue the art form.

Seven years later, hip hop and Drake have stood the test of time; Frere-Jones’s predictions haven’t. The rap golden age of the ’90s may be over, but rappers today are achieving a kind of mainstream cultural influence that would’ve been hard to imagine twenty years ago. In April, Vanity Fairlisted the impossibly cool Harlem rapper and fashion icon A$AP Rocky among its twenty-three cultural “disrupters,” and last week Time magazine named Kendrick Lamar, the Afro-centric Compton emcee, and Nicki Minaj, the singer and razor-sharp New York wordsmith, as two of the world’s 100 Most Influential People. Drake, with four platinum records in a row, is now the biggest name in a genre with more than a few big names. (In February of 2015, he had a whopping twenty-one songs simultaneously on Billboard’s top 50 Hot R&B/Hip Hop chart.) Would it be an exaggeration to say that he saved hip hop? Yes, it really would. But Drake’s unlikely success and hip hop’s comeback are two parts of the same story.

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