Listen up nerds: It’s time to finally start a legitimate
discussion about Canada’s finest MC and rap’s go to punching bag Aubrey Graham,
more affectionately known under his stage moniker, Drake.
My man Drake has managed to really ruffle some public feathers
since his rap career took off, launching him from the halls of Degrassi High
into music’s megastar stratosphere. Why the constant hate for Drake from almost
everywhere regardless of taste
preferences, intelligence, race, gender, or other identifiers? Well, he rebukes
the stereotypes society tries to subscribe to him for one. A Jewish childhood
actor turned rapper from Canada who sings about his feelings? Wait a second,
that doesn’t fit into any of these neat little boxes we have laying around!
This is bullshit, Drake. If you’re gonna rap, then why are
you smiling?!
People are uncomfortable with Drake because he doesn’t force
packaged “hardcore” rap rhetoric into his rhymes, but still frequently expresses
himself as a hardcore rapper. The truth is, identity concepts like "hardcore gangsta rapper" don't really, truly exist in society because they are too trivialized to encompass the complexities of human nature. What does it sound like when we criticize a man
for being openly vulnerable? What does it mean when a man exhibits a
willingness to express feelings and he is met with mockery and insults on his
very manhood? It sounds to me like the same old (broken) American system that
reduces men to anger and stoicism. And I wanna see some receipts on where
that’s a positive social move.
A huge part of feminist dialogue is about keeping things
female-centered; it can make sense when talking about a system blatantly
subordinating woman to want to keep the dialogue focused on female voices and
perspectives. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t look to men as allies. And
that doesn’t mean we don’t need to understand and analyze the male experience
as much as we do the female experience.
Everyone has to foster a new environment where we can learn
to reward men for expressing their feelings. It is really not a good thing to
encourage anyone to repress parts of themselves, and that is effectively what
we are doing when we ostracize people who don’t adhere to stereotypes or whom
fall outside the acceptable social spectrum for a specific role they were
externally assigned. That creates psychological issues such as displaced anger.
Could it be that a patriarchally run society traps men as much as it traps
women? And could it be that maybe- just MAYBE- Drake is bucking some serious
stereotypes about what it means to be a man, to be a rapper, to be black- and
that it is making some people uncomfortable? Can we allow for real authentic
human beings like Drake, whose story is more than a wikipedia page, to exist?
Started from the bottom, and now....well, you know the rest.
In case you missed it, here's Drake's auto-biographical opening monologue from his recent AMAZING stint as SNL host:
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