What is it about?
This article examines the cultural conditions of that success, exploring how nationality, race, gender, and class intersect with hip hop as a genre in Drake's work.
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Why is it important?
Drake is one of the most commercially successful pop music artists in history and certainly the most commercially successful hip hop artist to emerge from Canada. Exploring the cultural conditions of that success sheds light on the cultural work hip hop performs in Canada and the US (from where Drake's success arguably stems), as well as the possibilities and constraints public figures such as Drake face in the public performance of hip hop's racial, gendered, and national identities.
Perspectives
Shortly after completing this article, I taught a 3rd-year special topics course in the Cultural Studies program of my university called Hip Hop Publics: The Case of Drake. In that course, the students and I explored Drake's work as a negotiation of belonging in various contexts, but also as an outcropping of a history of Canadian hip hop. We spoke in that course about why studying Drake was worthwhile and I think that this article makes the case that such a study can allow for an examination of intersecting discourses and cultural conditions that otherwise remain invisible.
Alexandra Boutros
Wilfrid Laurier University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The impossibility of being Drake: Or, what it means to be a successful (Black) Canadian rapper, Global Hip Hop Studies, June 2020, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/ghhs_00006_1.
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