I know I haven’t delved into hip hop too much on this thing, but I’ve written about everything else that interests me on this blog, and might as well keep that theme going. And the reason I’m interested in Drake, as opposed to other rappers out there, is that when I first encountered his music I was totally and completely into it. And now, after some time, I find myself just getting more and more pissed at the dude. And I’m trying to figure out why.

So let’s try and figure out why. Drake, as you all know, used to be a Canadian child actor who played a cripple on a soap opera. As in really. You can see pictures of this and everything.

Now he’s a certified rap star. Big albums. Huge guest appearances. Adoring fans. Etc. We can all agree this wasn’t an easy transition to make. To go from playing the crippled kid on a TV show (does anyone see this kid going platinum any time soon?), and not only on a TV show, a Canadian TV show, to a bigger-than-life rap star is mind-boggling. But Drake did it. And what’s so interesting to me isn’t that he made the transition, but rather how he made that transition.

Musically, he did it pretty ingeniously. Basically, Drake took all the appeal of emo-rap, people like Lupe Fiasco and Kid Cudi, and then took out all the weirdness. Drake gives you the emotional introspection over hazy beats, without all the weird shit about robots and the quasi-political pro-Palestinian ramblings of Lupe. He gives you soulful singing over hip hop beats, without the solipsism and suicide-references of Cudi. Drake, basically, is Emo-Rap Lite.

Lyrically, Drake made this transition in an even more interesting way.

(And before I go into it, let me just point out how freaking difficult it would be for someone to do this. To transition from a child soap opera actor to rapper means you have to somehow spin your personal narrative from that of a cheesy kid in a wheelchair to a justifiable hunk. To do that and also be from Canada is nearly impossible.)

But Drake did it. And he did it, I believe, is by stressing how “real” he is. A lot of his songs stress the fact that he is “real” and the rest of the rappers out there are “fake.” He stresses over and over again, this realness.

Which is totally fucking nuts. And not just because the entire concept of being “real” vs. “fake” is in itself nuts (which it is, but that’s a story for another day), but because Drake has asserted this “realness” upon himself.

Because let’s look at what “real” traditionally means in a rap sense. As far as I can tell, to be “real” means that you stay true to who you are, you don’t forget where you came from, and, well, fuck, I don’t really know. You don’t talk shit about people? You don’t say things about people behind their back, maybe?

Basically, it’s hard to define. But what’s interesting to me, at least, is that even by the sketchiest definition of what “real” is, Drake has absolutely none of those things going for him. If being real is staying true to who you are, and Drake was “real”, would he not still be an actor playing cripples on soap operas or whatever? On top of that, isn’t the very definition of an actor someone who “fakes”? Wouldn’t the fact that he was an actor call into question the very “realness” of anything he does? (Call this the Ronald Reagan Corollary.)

And plus of course isn’t a huge part of “realness” staying true to where you come from? Drake comes from Canada. Other than his most recent video being shot in Toronto, Drake has never really owned up to where he comes from. On his first mixtape, he had a song called “HoustAtlantaVegas.” Which is a combination of Houston, Atlanta and Vegas. Instead of singing about being from Canada, he basically combined three cities into one, allowing him to somehow be from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And still sing how “real” he is.

Which makes me wonder—do people not notice how hypocritical he is with all this shit, or do they just not care? Because I’ll admit, I loved Drake when I first heard him. The song “Say What’s Real”, which my buddy Ben played for me on a long car trip, totally captured my imagination. Mostly it was because he took Kanye’s shockingly underrated beat for “Say You Will” and crushed it, but also because a lot of what Drake said on the song was cool and interesting. His line about losing his cell phone in Cabo which had all his rhymes on it, so if you “find a Blackberry with the side scroll sell that motherfucker to any rapper that I know” was crazy and awesome and made me really think that Drake could be a big deal.

But then I listened to the song more closely. And I realized that it just didn’t make any sense at all. At one point in the song Drake talks about buying a Phantom car, but then reveals his mother is embarrassed by this, so: “I park about 5 houses down / She say I shouldn’t have it until I have the crown / But I don’t want to feel the need to wear disguises around.”

Ok, um, let’s unpack this for a second. Drake is telling us here that he somehow bought a Phantom, a car worth around $400k. (It’s not clear if he bought this with his Degrassi money or what.) But his mother is embarrassed for him to have the car, because she doesn’t think he should have it until he has “the crown.”

What? I don’t even know what to make of this. His mother won’t let him park a half a million dollar car outside because he doesn’t have a “crown.” Is his mother seriously denying her son that car until he is the best rapper alive? Is that what the “crown” means? How is any of this “real”?

A bigger question: who believes any of this?

Why, if rap fans are so concerned with “realness”, are we allowing a former child star who generically raps about cool things in a slightly emotional way, even if those rhymes don’t make any sense, to classify himself as “real?”

Or is that the bigger point? That in this brave new world, we are whatever we say we are, as long as we say it loudly and often enough. Drake has created a fictional reality in which he is from three different cities (Houston, Atlanta, Vegas and NOT Toronto), a world in which his mother is embarrassed that he has a nice car because she doesn’t feel he has proven himself as a rapper yet. (Can you imagine showing up to your house with a Phantom and have your mother telling you to park it down the street because she doesn’t think you’ve earned an arbitrary title?)

But Drake says it all with conviction, so I guess people believe him. And it doesn’t matter if any of it makes sense, because he’s doing it in a cool way and he’s good looking.

So what does that make “realness” now, I guess, is the question I’m left asking. Any ideas?