Drake Has A Complicated Relationship With Hometown Toronto
By Charlotte Graham
This past weekend, Drake released a mixtape with little warning beforehand, using Beyonce’s marketing methodology of last year to take the Internet by storm. The mixtape is not the album fans have been anticipating (Views From the Six), but it provides satisfaction with 17 tracks on growing up in “the 6,” handling fame, and relationships.
If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late has a different sound than Drake’s past outputs. It’s been heavily influenced by the time Drake has spent in Atlanta, and it has a grittier and more contemporary edge than the more commercial sounding Thank Me Later, or even the critically-acclaimed Nothing Was the Same. The greatest difference with this mixtape, however, is how adamantly it deals with the connection between Drake and his hometown.
Though Drake has proudly referenced Toronto before, he began featuring his city more prominently beginning with his 2013 album Nothing Was the Same. But if Drake’s last album issued a shoutout here and there to Toronto, this one is a full blown love letter. Drake is beginning to make use of one of the rap genre’s favorite tools: that of representing where you come from, and using it to animate your own character. A$AP Mob reps New York City’s Harlem, and Black Hippy never fails to remind listeners that they hail from Compton. But while these two neighborhoods have produced rep-happy rap heavyweights before (Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, The Notorious B.I.G., Nas, and Jay-Z to name a few), Toronto has never come out with a rapper before, much less someone so proud to represent the city.
Drake and Toronto have a complicated relationship. On the one hand, it’s hard for Toronto not to love Drake. For the fifth-biggest city on the continent, Toronto doesn’t get a lot of publicity, and not a lot of famous people call Toronto home. NYC and LA are used to getting all the glory, so it’s nice for Toronto to have some attention. Canada and Toronto are easy to make fun of, but Drake is proud of his heritage. On the other hand, if you’re from Toronto, it’s a lot easier to make fun of Drake, because you know what’s real and what’s not real.
“Started From the Bottom” is a good example of the weird dichotomy between Drake and Toronto. The song off Nothing Was the Same is about starting at the bottom (as one would guess) and ending up somewhere much better. Drake describes the hardship of growing up in Toronto, but with the energy of a chest-pounding success anthem, more appropriate for a party than for an introspective listen. More than any of Drake’s previous tracks, “Started From the Bottom” called out Toronto in a way in which the northern city had never experienced before in rap or hip-hop, or in music in general. The music video for the song features Drake flying around the CN tower in a private jet, dancing around in Shopper’s Drugmart (a popular Torontonian pharmacy), strutting across a billboard posted above the 401 in downtown Toronto, and zooming through the streets of his hometown on a white Bentley. The problem with this extended shoutout to the city Drake grew up in is that there is a very distinct hint of falseness to it.
Drake did not, in fact, start from the bottom — far from it, actually. Drake hails from upscale Forest Hill, moving to the neighborhood at age 11 after his parent’s divorced. For a massive city, Toronto is actually relatively safe, but there are some areas in the city where you couldn’t pay someone to go if they didn’t absolutely have to. The “bottom” of Toronto could be Jane and Finch, with the highest murder rate in the city; it could be Regent Park, the largest housing project complex in Canada and the most dangerous one as well. It could be Scarborough, an area with a reputation of having M-13 gang members roam the streets. But nobody in Toronto would ever say that the bottom would be Forest Hill.
Forest Hill is not only an incredibly safe neighborhood, it’s one of the wealthiest in Toronto as well. Two of Toronto’s best private schools call Forest Hill home, and mansions dot the streets. Drake didn’t grow up as wealthy as some others in his neighborhood; there are areas of Forest Hill that are solidly middle-class, and it is there that Drake grew up. Drake went to Forest Hill Collegiate and then Vaughan Road Academy — again, two schools that are neither the nicest and most privileged schools in the city, nor the scariest either. As far as anyone knows, one of Drake’s greatest tribulations growing up was the splitting up of his parents. This is not to say that Drake, or anyone who isn’t from an incredibly impoverished area, hasn’t faced struggles or pain in his life. It’s just that Drake is at his best when he’s being genuine. Drake has his own place the music industry right now; he’s not Kendrick Lamar or A$AP Rocky, he’s a middle-class kid from Toronto who has found a niche — and that niche is not rapping about an embellished past of growing up in the hood.
So there’s the fact that Drake often likes to pretend that he has more street cred than he actually does, a tendency he exhibits throughout If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. On “Energy,” Drake talks about all the enemies he has. On “You & The 6,” he raps about the great struggles he endured growing up in Toronto. However, in this track, the real Drake seems to shine through. Though he still feels the need to over emphasize a rough past, the heart of this song lays with his relationship with his mother and his deep connection to his city.
The greater annoyance that Toronto has with Drake, however, is in his recently coined term describing the city. “The 6” is a monicker which nobody in Toronto, other than Drake and his OVO crew as of late, has ever, ever used. Toronto has a lot of nicknames; T, T.Dot, T.O. “The 6” has never been one of them. Originating from Toronto’s two main area codes (416 and 647), “The 6” was purely invented by Drake, and is now used by pretty much everyone outside of “the 6” in reference to the city, but by nobody from Toronto. Drake’s attempts to brand Toronto “the 6” run rampant in this mixtape, with peak songs on the album such as “6 God” and “6 Man” dropping the name throughout, and with the albums (arguably) greatest song, “Know Yourself” painting a picture of Drake “running through the 6 with [his] W.O.E’s.” Of course, this lyric points to Drake’s self awareness of his sadboy persona, all the while actually repping his crew, represented by the acronym W.O.E. (Working On Excellence).
The thing about Drake’s use of “the 6” is that, obnoxious as it may be to those from Toronto, Drake seems to be so earnest in his usage that it’s difficult to stay annoyed with him for long. On “6 God,” Drake raps about how he and he alone has the throne of Toronto — and to be fair, why shouldn’t he? New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Miami all get their shout outs; even Pitbull likes to remind people that he’s “Mr. 305.” Drake’s done a lot for his city lately; in 2013 he became the “global ambassador” for the recently revitalized Toronto Raptors, and he’s been bringing OVO Fest to Toronto for years now.
In one of his first tracks in which he used his personal brand for Toronto, 2014’s “0 to 100/The Catch Up,” Drake proclaims: “The 6 ain’t friendly but it’s where I lay up.” And he’s right; Toronto may not be friendly, even to Drake, but it can’t be denied that it’s been put on the map.
[image by Patrick King]
