Thoughts on Drake’s ‘Forever’ and hipster rap

I feel like maybe letting the homie rangerbob go in on Drake (and blog-rap in general) might’ve been a bad look without me supplementing his rants with some thoughts on the subject. Because sometimes you gotta be direct with the people.

At this point, Drake has gotten big enough so that regular people who don’t look to the Internest for their hip-hop needs actually know of him. That’s a breakthrough for blog-rap. This shows that on some level, blogs can be used as a viable testing grounds to launch an artist from Internest fame into actual, real-life fame (though whether that’s by the power of bloggers or by the power of labels to manipulate bloggers is a different debate).

So we get to “Forever” which isn’t really special one way or the other except that it features Drake, a rising star, and Kanye and Lil Wayne, the two artists that labels are trying to mimic the most and most definitely, the two artists from whom Drake derives his style the most. One of my rap friends told me that this track, “Forever,” is what converted him. He had been hating on Drake previously but this made him give Mr. Degrassi some respect. We talked about it some and then he described Drake as “like if Kanye could rap.”

The Parent ‘Hood Sure-Shots

I actually managed to think of two different Father’s Day posts. The first, which I threw up @ Examiner, collects tracks that rappers make with their kids. But a few of those are kinda lame. Here’s some good music centered around parenthood in some way, though one of them isn’t about a father exactly. But yknow, Ghostface can get away with that:

Lil Wayne “How Can Something“
The mixtape Weezy details love, divorce, and the loss of his daughter in the aftermath of that divorce. I can’t imagine anyone, even staunch Lil Wayne haters (who still exist), not feeling this track and not acknowledging that Wayne is a huge talent.

“My babygirl thought I was fuckin every little freak
But darling, I was raised by a woman, that ain’t the real me
Still she managed to spill out a little me
Watched them doctors wipe the blood from her little feet.”

Just as important as the lyrics are Wayne’s pained, stressed, perpetually on the verge of breaking down delivery (the same delivery from “Duffle Bag Boy” and “My Life“) that sells it.