"How People Treat Other People Is A Direct Refrlection Of How They Feel About Themselves"
When he was just 23, the rapper Drake set a goal for himself: He'd make $25 million by the time he was 25 years old by rapping about money, cars, girls, and—here's the bizarre part—his rawest feelings and emotions. He achieved it. Easily. Now 26 and readying his most inspired album yet, the Canadian sensation has set a new goal for himself. The approach is the same, but the endgame is exponentially more ambitious
It begins at three in the afternoon—the pool party—about an hour after Drake wakes in his manse in the San Fernando Valley. Another brightly scrubbed California day, and Drake's crew—the guys from Toronto who live with him here—are downright joyous. It's been a stretch of hard work, and everyone's eager to blow it up a little. Suddenly, bikinied women seem to materialize from thin air, as if competing in a rap beauty pageant. Some are super chatty, some aloof; some are full-bodied, some as wispy as a tamarack. A number swan about as if in a museum or a music video, firing their iPhone cameras, while others take dramatic, slow-motion strolls by the pool, as if this all will soon be theirs.
Drake's home is its own fantasia, a single-level ranch that sprawls in various wings over 7,500 square feet, from the game room to the gym to Drake's master bedroom with Jacuzzi. The pool is like a scene out of Waterworld, with a bar inside a grotto, waterfalls, and a slide that drops thirty feet through the rock. Someone leaps from the top of the waterfall into the pool while another holds on to the cliff and does pull-ups. Hung everywhere, the indoor-outdoor flat-screen TVs shine like mirrors. On the property are stables, a mechanical bull, and a movie theater. There's an air-conditioned doghouse and a wine cellar. Drake bought the place for $7.7 million from a restaurant-chain mogul who threw in all the furniture, too. When the front gate opens to allow passage, a woman's voice coos, "Access granted." Drake's boys call it Disneyland.
When not on the road, Drake splits time between here and Toronto—where he grew up and his mother still resides—surrounded by his boys, a rotating collection of about a dozen. At the kitchen island right now, a coterie of flirty women chat with Chubbs and Spoon, CJ and 40 (Drake's musical collaborator, Noah "40" Shebib, who makes the beats and mixes all the songs). Drake finds me taking in the scene. "This ain't every day," he says. "I really don't live some crazy rapper life."
I kind of believe him. Beneath the banter and joviality—beneath Drake's thousand-watt smile—one almost immediately senses a moodier seriousness, a grown-up intention, though he admits, "Today I want my boys to have their fun." Still, with the weeks counting down to a (supposed) August release for his new album, Nothing Was the Same, and a tour scheduled to follow, the pressure has ratcheted up another notch, the crew have cinched a little tighter around their leader, and Drake is trying to shield himself from all the distractions, in order to prove himself once again.
This time—three albums in, at the age of 26—the stakes seem highest of all, because Drake wants the crown. Album sales, critical acclaim, street cred. If unintentional, his timing is uncanny, because both Kanye West and Jay-Z have new albums coming out just before his, which means this summer will say a lot about the current state of rap. There's Kanye, the trailblazer, who's churned out some of the genre's most radio-ready hits this past decade. But on his new album, Yeezus, he's gone dark and aggressive and chosen not to release an official radio single. Then there's Jay-Z, who morphs a certain street hustler's cool and indifference into CEO extravagance. But for all his prominence, Jay-Z hasn't written a lot of crossover hits. Which leaves Drake, who's staked out an interior space all his own, willing to rap and sing (he gets a lot of attention for doing both) about love and desire, loneliness and isolation. At the moment, Drake is also, unquestionably, the most radio-friendly—his voice has been a constant presence on the airwaves in recent years, on his own hits and those he's gifted to other artists. It's wildly competitive; they each want to be number one. And—here's the crazy part—Drake is the favorite.
This is Drake's constant quest, to search out that emotional connection, even in a crowd of 18,000. That's both his power and, according to his Internet parodists and haters, his Achilles' heel: his willingness to show emotion, to write revealing, autobiographical lyrics, and on occasion, between the rapper tropes of bravado and materialism, to demonstrate a flash of moral conscience in a game of misogynistic excess. And for his trouble, he's been called a "counterfeit rapper" (Ludacris), "a fuckin' piece of shit" (DMX), and "a straight pussy" (Lil' Kim), and cajoled to "come out the closet" (Chris Brown). Common rapped: You so black and white, trying to live a nigga's life... / You ain't wet nobody, nigga, you Canada dry. And that's coming from Common.
"You notice they don't criticize the music itself, though," says Drake about his detractors. "I'm okay with that."
Right now, Drake says, he feels like a boxer in training before the main event. "You know the way fighters don't fuck before the fight?" he says. "Sometimes I feel like I'm so focused on training my body and getting my mind right to create this album that sex isn't one of my main priorities. If someone is around that I know and trust, I'm down. But I'm not going to end up with some stranger at this party."
Even as the house fills with half-naked ladies, Drake remains off to the side, observing—in the TV room or up in the studio, what he calls the Safari Room, for its painting of a lion on the wall—puffing on his hookah, worrying with 40 over every little mix and mumble and what its final effect will be. He's putting music "in the box," he says, in his computer here in the Safari Room, where the tracks remain a secret as yet. Sometimes he'll pull out his BlackBerry and start thumb-typing, not a text but some new lyric he's heard in his head. He collects the fragments by day and stitches them together at night.
Outside, the pool party is thumping as the sky darkens, Future and Kendrick Lamar on the stereo, several stacks of pizza boxes, drinks galore. Drake hangs around the edges of his own party but eventually moves through the crowd like Gatsby, saying his hellos, chilling, laughing, like anyone his age.
A little while later, though, he's huddled with 40 on the steps outside the Safari Room, both of them nodding their heads, going over something intensely. The party is climbing to that point where all responsibility will soon be abdicated. The music blares. Some dude puffs his chest and dives again from the top of the waterfall. Without announcing it, Drake disappears back to the studio. He's felt something and wants to get it down, in hopes you'll feel it, too.
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