Stavrogin on the 6: A Case Against Drake by Robert Lashley
“people Dostoevsky would have gone to town on”
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My father got most of his drugs by stiff-arming runners. They were boys my age or slightly older, who had made that bargain with a corner Faust and were in various stages understanding of the price they had to pay for it. He would target teenagers, small kids, people my size who didn't look like they would have the wherewithal to shoot him. His routine with them depended on what stage of drug dementia he was in. On the first of the month, he may pay full price. By the middle of the month, he would try run psych games on kids and tell them to give discounts because he was once an important black man. Toward the end, he would brutally beat them, knowing they had no network or recourse on the account that their job had made them the wretched of the black earth.
None of the kids were millionaires. None of the kids had lavish parties. I'm not saying this out of tremendous sympathy for them: they chose what they chose when other people in the neighborhood did not. I'm just stating facts. What drove their economy weren't hidden hood party mansions, it was an economy almost completely outside of hilltop.
Aubrey “Drake” Graham—the most popular black male figure in North American music, came up from R&B royalty (uncle: Larry Graham), lived in a gated community at a very young age, and was a Television star before he left high school. He has stayed true to his suburban caste roots in his first album and mixtapes, but in recent years has adopted a gangsta persona that is the most ridiculous any rapper has taken in the history of this planet. If you think that anything he says about safe houses and selling crack when he was a teen pop TV star has any merit, you have not crossed the stage to adulthood.
Also, if you do buy his persona, you are buying the myth that what happened in communities like Hilltop is not your fault and that nobody who is from your economic bracket plays a part in its fate. Graham speaks a language very familiar to me: coming home from University Place on the bus, I would see numbers of suburban black and white teenagers who would cruise the neighborhood. They had big mouths, were eager to show you how hard they were, and would pull the rank of their caste rapidly if anyone in the community protested them too much. Like their parents who had worked at businesses’ interests outside the neighborhood, they saw Hilltop and its people there as nothing but material, capital to mold for one’s own purpose then throw away without any regard.
Graham’s recent mixtape almost cleared half a million in its first week. His upcoming full-length will most likely double that. Many people in Canada and the United States look at him and see a charming pop star. Some look at him, see the "best rapper in the game." I see—in an artist and a great deal of his fans—people Dostoevsky would have gone to town on. I might be wrong, however. I’m still kind of…what’s the word?…ghetto.
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To read Robert Lashley's essay, "Why Kendrick Lamar Is a Great Artist (And Why Black People Have a Right to Be Wary of Him)," go here.
Header image courtesy of photographer Amoxi.
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