Canadian rapper Aubrey Graham (a.k.a. Drake) takes himself a little too seriously. Which makes perfect sense being that he got his start as a soap opera star. Appearing on Degrassi: The Next Generation, he played the part of Jimmy Brooks, a basketball player who is confined to a wheelchair after getting shot by a classmate. His character was featured in 138 episodes until 2009, when he then graduated from high school. As far as acting goes, Drake does a great job playing the part of an upper-class, Toronto-raised actor-turned-rapper-and-preacher-of-struggle who denies how much of his success he owes to circumstantial industry connections, his affluent Jewish upbringing, or the fact that his friend's dad (a talent agent) is how he got on TV in the first place. Entitlement is just part of Drake's M.O. (if his complaints about being replaced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman on the cover of Rolling Stone, and subsequent solipsistic non-apology are any indication). Drake is ultimately able to perpetuate his own melodrama because he has been afforded the particularly advantageous life of getting paid to partake in fictional melodrama. But it just comes with the territory; Drake is a tortured artist who manufactures torture in order to manufacture tortured art. So really, without that fictional wheelchair, and that fictional backstory, there would be no Drake as we know him now. Just a kid with a first and last name, and a real life. And what's grandiose about that?
Ryan is a song-writer (soundcloud.com/the-articles), music journalist, vinyl enthusiast, 80s pop-culturalist, and just kind of a vaudevillian person.
Ryan is also available for hire. Email him at 505sandheartbreak@gmail.com with any kind of (non-sexual) work petitions.
