The impossibility of being Drake: Or, what it means to be a successful (Black) Canadian rapper

Abstract

This article takes Canadian hip hop artist Drake, his celebrity and his body of work as a point of departure for an examination of discursive constructions of race, hip hop and Canada in intersection. Canada’s role in the global hip hop movement has always been contested; circumscribed from abroad by its proximity to the United States and at home by its ideological positioning of Black citizens and Black cultural production vis-à-vis the imagined nation. Framed by broader questions of the role of hip hop in the Canadian public sphere, this discursive analysis analyses the work and utterances of Drake as well as discourses produced about Drake through music criticism and by other hip hop artists. Drake’s public performance of Blackness via hip hop is framed by overlapping and competing ideologies. Drake ‐ whose public persona seems to embody a number of seemingly competing identities ‐ is ‘impossible’ in so far as he is the product of intersecting, circulating conceptualizations of Blackness that render only some performances of Blackness both commercially viable and authentically hip hop, while others remain impossible, unacceptable, unutterable or unimaginable both inside and outside the nation state.

Anti-populist populism: Musical challenges to Trump's America and Erdoğan's Turkey

“…Hip hop videos were chosen because this global and popular genre is closely associated with ‘dissent and critique’ (Walser 1995, p. 197), although this differs across borders. American hip hop tends to tackle political issues of Black rights and racism by musicians revealing ‘personal truths’ linked to lived experiences in predominantly Black urban neighbourhoods (Walser 1995; Fraley 2009, p. 43; Boutros 2020, p. 99). Global hip hop politics include ‘youth protest and resistance around the World’ (Williams 2010, p. 67), which challenges the status quo (Lee 2010, p. 139).…”