Is Drake the first hip hop star to make weakness cool?

Photo: Rex Features

 

 

 

 

 

Hip hop has a tough, aggressive image - but now Drake is selling millions of records that reveal a softer side. Is rap changing forever? Greg Kot investigates.

On his 2011 album, Take Care, Drake felt sufficiently put-upon to issue a disclaimer: “Showing emotion don’t ever mean I’m a pussy,” he rapped. It was a telling moment on what turned out to be a big album, a multi-million-seller that affirmed Toronto-born Aubrey Drake Graham’s status as a hip hop star.
Now, with Nothing Was the Same as the number one album in the US with first-week sales of more than 600,000, Drake is again doing what once seemed impossible in mainstream hiphop: he’s made vulnerability cool.
That’s no small achievement in a genre where testosterone is often a must, swagger a given, toughness a requirement. For decades, vulnerability was often interpreted as weakness. The notion that an MC could have feelings was often reason enough to put the rapper’s manhood in question. Hip hop itself was built on wordplay defined not just by skill but by one-upmanship, the idea that he who talked the toughest and verbally smoked his rivals was the best MC. In the ghettos from where hip hop rose, putting up anything less than a tough-as-nails exterior could be an invitation to a beatdown or worse. No wonder rappers needed to come across as invulnerable, immune to sentimentality. In the early days, rappers were poet-warriors whose words, to paraphrase Public Enemy’s Chuck D, had the impact of bullets.
Tough love?
There were exceptions. LL Cool J had a hit single in 1987 with what was widely viewed as the first hip hop ballad, I Need Love. In an era when MCs such as Run-DMC. and Rakim came hard or not at all, the suave LL dared to play the seductive ladies man. But it was no coincidence that he also kept swinging the iron, flexing on the cover of the aptly-named album Mama Said Knock You Out a few years later.
Other hip hop groups enjoyed brief flurries of success by taking a less aggressive tack during the height of the gangsta-rap era. De La Soul delivered Daisy Age psychedelia and PM Dawn, melodic spirituality. Digable Planets played it jazzy and whimsical and Arrested Development brought a gentle earnestness. The Fugees scored a massive 1995 hit with a cover of Roberta Flack’s quintessentially sensitive 1970s R&B ballad, Killing Me Softly.
More soul-searching voices emerged by the late ‘90s, in response to what was seen as the materialism of hip hop’s Puff Daddy phase. Underground rappers such as Atmosphere and the Stan-era Eminem matched the introspective ‘emo’ punks of indie rock. OutKast reached No. 1 on the pop charts in 2001 with Ms. Jackson, in which Andre 3000 offers a contrite apology to the mother of his ex-lover.