Courtesy: Cash Money Records, Republic Records and Young Money Entertainment He could be performing 2013’s single ‘Hold On, We’re Going Home’ – featuring the lingering refrain ‘I can’t get over you / you left your mark on me / I want your hot love and emotion, endlessly’ – while billows of smoke unfurl like a snow-white elm from the slit of his lips or melting the conflicting feelings that follow a break-up, as he dopily dances under fluorescent lights in his ‘Hot Line Bling’ (2015) music video, shrouded in pink mist – but Drake-as-rose-clasping-crooner is who we knoweth and love.ĭrake, Scorpion, 2018. Themes of unrequited love, betrayal and deception abound. This isn’t the first time Drizzy has invoked renaissance art: his ‘6 God’ album artwork depicts the rapper’s hands clasped in ominous benediction, sketched with the empyrean gentleness of Albrecht Dürer’s Study for the Hands of the Apostle (1508) while on ‘Do Not Disturb’ (from 2017’s mix-tape More Life) he directly references a lack of Shakespearean desire: ‘I ain’t got no time to be no Romeo’. It reinforces what makes Drake so compelling: his use of classical melodrama, which tenderly burns throughout his oeuvre.ĭrake, Take Care, 2011.
In Measure for Measure (1603), for instance, Signor Claudio is sentenced to public beheading for allegedly impregnating a woman out of wedlock. The narrative unfolding here is weirdly Shakespearean where the emotional toil between single fathers and their estranged (‘bastard’) children is explored across his plays. On ‘Emotionless’ he raps ‘I wasn’t hidin’ my kid from the world/I was hidin’ the world from my kid’ over an ethereal Mariah Carey sample and dark, menacing bass: confirming the venomous rumours to be true: yes, he has secretly become a parent. Through soft monotones we hear Drake-as-jaded-knight confess the cruellest of sins, with the candour characteristic of a Scorpio ascendant. In Scorpion, Drake resurrects the image presented on the cover of his 2011 album Take Care: a lonely soul seated at a burnished throne, staring forlornly into a chalice against a backdrop of marble walls and gilded paintings aglow in the flickering light of a single, Roman candle. A musician of mythic, millennial legend, his legacy falls somewhere between harsh, armoured rapper and soothing, caramel-inflected R&B troubadour: with this album affirming his ability to seamlessly masquerade as each. Last summer, in the realm of hip-hop, amidst the infernal afterglow of Pusha T’s public condemnation that Drake had illicitly fathered – and hidden – a child, the Toronto-based recording artist released his fifth studio album Scorpion (2018), named in honour of his astrological sign.