He studied poetry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and dresses like Dennis Rodman. If there is one thing Sumney is known for, aside from his Prince-like falsetto and his polymathic musical acuity, it’s his rejection of that sort of thing - all the conventions that usually surround gender and racial and sexual identity. It also felt sweetly conventional: “Very ’90s talk show,” he later told me, laughing at the before-and-after setup.
It was an unusually casual post for an artist whose presentation is usually careful and curated, full of expertly art-directed dispatches from another reality. how it’s going,” read the text in the caption, above a great number of enthusiastic and sometimes prurient comments.
The other displayed the glistening, supercut physique of a professional athlete or superhero. One showed a typical good-looking young guy in his underwear. Last October, the singer and songwriter Moses Sumney opened up Instagram and posted side-by-side photos of himself, shirtless.
Celina Pereira is a Brazilian-American graphic designer and artist based in Los Angeles. Ismail Muhammad is a staff editor for the magazine. It revealed an artist who had not matured along with me, who could no longer evoke emotional specificity. “Toosie Slide,” though, was a song for children. As in years past, I wanted to turn to Drake, to let him narrate my melancholy back to me. I felt embittered, betrayed and upset at myself for making a necessary decision at the worst possible time. I broke up with my partner a week before California issued stay-at-home orders.
In this context, “Toosie Slide” is the sound of Drake in emotional and artistic stasis, rapping about the same immature romantic conflicts he was rapping about in 2010. Is there a musical artist who has more accurately conveyed the distorted sense of emotional investment we can have in a text exchange, or the satisfaction in knowing that an ex is checking our Instagram stories?ĭrake narrated the emotional tenor of life in my 20s, but I am in my 30s now, and it feels harder to ignore the rapper’s faults - especially when those faults begin to extend to questionable interactions with adolescent actresses or a social media presence that seems more appropriate to those actresses (what is it with the constant duck lips?). Drake reflected back to my generation the scattershot and confused nature of our romantic pursuits in the era of dating apps and social media, when we were all suddenly on camera, the subjects of our own reality shows. One night, when the cheesy 2013 single “Hold On, We’re Going Home” came on during a party I threw, all the dancers in my kitchen audibly sighed as if their most private desires had been sated. Yet the most crucial element of Drake’s endurance as a pop-cultural figure has been the way he insinuated himself into the emotional life of millennials like me. In both instances, Drake survived scandal and remained the surest thing in rap music. The effect was a sense of invincibility: In 2015, the rapper Meek Mill outed Drake for using a ghostwriter, and in 2018, Pusha T revealed that Drake fathered a secret son. Then there were his endlessly quotable lyrics, which spawned memes that he would then reabsorb into his music and performances. Built atop tinny drums and a serpentine synth line that sounds more appropriate for a funeral dirge than a dance track, the song finds Drake dully rap-talking about his usual concerns: snakelike enemies, lovers who’ve fallen by the wayside, his inability to trust anyone but his closest friends.ĭrake’s strength has always been his versatility, a stylistic playfulness that could accommodate dancehall, Afropop, Houston trap and New Orleans bounce. Even for a rapper who built his career on claustrophobic melancholy, it felt too insular.
Released just as we were resigning ourselves to the pandemic, it was accompanied by a video that featured a masked Drake wandering his richly appointed but mostly empty Toronto mansion, occasionally demonstrating the dance for his audience.
It’s a maneuver Drake spent a decade perfecting: He is a master at co-opting trends.īut “Toosie Slide,” with its overly literal chorus - instructions for how to do the song’s inert dance (“It go right foot up, left foot slide/Left foot up, right foot slide”) - fell flat. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Drake stopped feeling like a vital artist, but it’s easy to say which song crystallized his sagging influence: “Toosie Slide,” the lead single off his 2020 mixtape, “Dark Lane Demo Tapes.” The song was tailored to absorb an emerging pop-cultural phenomenon - in this case, the TikTok dance challenge.