There is an internet-famous photo of
Cam’ron wearing a pink mink jacket with a matching headband, holding a pink
flip phone to his ear. It was taken at a Baby Phat fashion show in 2003, when
the Harlem rapper was in his peak peacock era — a hardrock dandy oozing
loucheness and insouciance, blending an aura of toughness with devil-may-care
liberation.
اضافة اعلان
Drake was 16 when that future meme hit the
internet, a Canadian teen actor with rap star dreams. He had not yet formed the
aesthetic identity that would make him the most influential hip-hop performer
of the past decade. He was, first and foremost, a fan.
He still is. At the Apollo Theater in New
York City on Saturday night, at the first of two shows he performed for
SiriusXM subscribers, he brought out Cam’ron and the Diplomats for a guest set.
For that part of the show,
Drake wore Cam’ron’s pink mink jacket and headband —
the actual garments.
To be a fan in this era is to effectively write yourself into your idol’s story, or to make your idol’s art somehow about you.
This was something more than homage, and
also something more than mere enthusiasm. This was Drake making an in-joke to
the hip-hop internet of the early to mid-2000s, while acknowledging how fans of
all stripes would love to briefly inhabit the skin of their heroes. Given the
unique opportunity, Drake chose to become the meme.
Feeding the fansDrake is a social media sophisticate, a
fine walker of the almost completely obliterated line between fandom and
creation. No contemporary pop star has so effectively weaponized the ways in
which boosterism and distaste coexist in online spaces.
Drake may be the most popular musician
whose fans are not an organized troop, like the Swifties or the BeyHive — that
is because
Drake fandom is more interactive. Even his biggest detractors turn
their contempt into shareable bites, and Drake reacts to that dismissal with
cool élan, incorporating it into his narrative when it serves him.
To be a fan in this era is to effectively
write yourself into your idol’s story, or to make your idol’s art somehow about
you. And to be a truly modern celebrity is to acknowledge the ways in which you
are being consumed, positive and negative alike, and feed those mouths
accordingly.
The Drake collectionThis past week,
Drake played with that fire twice. His Apollo concert was mostly a hits and B-sides revue. But he
animatedly and joyously danced and rapped along while the Diplomats performed
“I Really Mean It”, “Dipset Anthem”, and Jim Jones’ “We Fly High”, a literal
display of how fandom has shaped his own career arc.
A few days earlier, he demonstrated the
same point in more ostentatious fashion. In the newly released video for
“Jumbotron ___ Poppin”, a song from his 2022 collaborative album with 21
Savage, Drake wore several iconic pieces of jewelry custom-made for Pharrell
Williams and recently sold by Joopiter, an auction platform founded by
Williams.
Drake spent around $2.7 million on the
items, including the signature 2005 N.E.R.D chain with pastel links created by
Jacob & Co., a yellow gold diamond-encrusted dual skateboard pendant chain
(also by Jacob & Co.), and a 14-karat yellow gold Sony PSP.
There is an additional layer of subtext
here. In a 2010 episode of the MTV show “When I Was 17”,
Drake revealed that,
as a teenager, he bought a microphone purportedly signed by Pusha T on eBay. At
that time, Drake was a committed fan of Clipse, the duo of Pusha T and his
brother Malice. (Williams, as part of the production duo the Neptunes, helped usher
Clipse into the world.)
That Drake has never been shy about how he soaks up influence sets him apart from most of his peers.
But in later years, Pusha T became Drake’s
primary antagonist, revealing via a song that Drake had fathered a son, and
also standing fast with Kanye West during the
Kanye-Drake cold war (until
recently, of course). On the MTV show, Drake said he used the mic so much as a
teenager that the autograph wore off (and conceded that it might not have even
been real). But in an interview with Rap Radar in 2019, he said that he still
owned the mic. It had ceased to be Pusha T’s; it had become his own.
The artist’s blatant fandomThat
Drake has never been shy about how he
soaks up influence sets him apart from most of his peers. (It is something he
shares with West, his primary idol turned rival.) He has long been an
enthusiastic booster of younger artists working in new styles, and speaks
openly of how his elders shaped him.
In hip-hop, where even covering another
rapper’s song is considered heresy, this kind of naked fandom is often
discouraged. And as might be expected,
Drake’s sartorial love notes this past
week resulted in a new raft of memes speculating about what other sorts of
accoutrements he might buy in order to insert himself into key moments in
hip-hop history: the paper towel bandanna from Jadakiss’ “Knock Yourself Out”
video, the gun used by Shyne in the 1999 Club New York shooting.
But being a fan of Drake means, in some
way, accepting that identity is constructed by trying on preexisting ones and
seeing what fits. Embedded in the act of putting on the coat or the necklace is
the knowledge that it eventually comes off — that is when you learn who you have
become.
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