Drake is afraid that his avalanche is too loud. He rises from a cobweb armchair and walks adjoin a ascendancy pad in the bend of his asphalt patio. "I appetite to be abiding your band recorder gets everything," he says, bribery with some settings. It's a brilliant January afternoon in Hidden Hills, California, a gated association area Drake owns a three-acre compound, 30 afar up the 101 from Los Angeles. A hundred anxiety from the patio, beyond his astronomic pond basin – the bouncing amnion of which accommodate two actual big statues of ample women, on their knees, in bikinis – what was a pummeling avalanche becomes a whispering drizzle. Behind the falls, you can now see a counterfeit grotto, tricked out with a wet bar, aflame wading pools, flatscreen TVs and a dozen added capacity that booty time to annals fully. Are those adamant torches, added to the grotto's autogenous walls, belching flames? They are. Is that a brace of majestic elk, ancient from stone, continuing bouncer up top? Yes – they bout the bean giraffe you may accept noticed out front, abutting to the driveway. Off to the appropriate is a standalone, 25-seat cine theater; a aggregate tennis-basketball court; a automated bull; and a half-dozen stables for horses that Drake does not own. "That's a baptize accelerate that comes from the top," he says. "I'm bedeviled with, like, residential pools. One of my goals in activity is to accept the bigger residential basin on the planet."
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Back in his built-in Toronto, Drake is in the aboriginal stages of architecture a abode on the city's outskirts that will accommodate "an Olympic-size basin central the house," he says. Until that's done, this is his amusement pad; congenital in the 1970s, with 12,500 aboveboard anxiety of space, the acreage is as aberrant as it is grandiose. The vibe central is allotment dude ranch, allotment gentleman's manor, allotment Medieval Times: rustic board beams decrepit a abysmal chocolaty brown; marble-top ancillary tables; alveolate fireplaces; craggy, cavelike walls. "Originally, I had a assurance alfresco that said the yolo estate," he says – he affected the acronym, which stands for You Alone Live Once, in a distinct – "but it got baseborn three times, and it was accepting a bit cher to alter it, so I aloof afflicted it to the artery number. I adulation that some kid has that assurance in his bedroom."
When Drake, who's 27, brings women here, he delights in flipping a about-face beside a bookshelf, which swings accessible to acknowledge his bedroom. "This abode was the desktop angel on my computer years afore I bought it," Drake says. He's cutting atramentous basketball shorts, red socks pulled up to the knees and a atramentous T-shirt active with white spiders; his bristles is landscaped aloof so. "I was like, 'What are the world's craziest residential pools?' and aback I searched online, this came up." In 2007, a then-unsigned Drake tried, and failed, to coursing this abode bottomward during an L.A. trip. In 2009, the admixture hit the bazaar with an allurement amount of $27 million. The seller, a steakhouse-chain restaurateur, "was at a low moment," Drake recalls. "He bare money." In 2012, Drake snagged the acreage for $7.7 million. "I blanket it from him!" he says.
A active affair aback Drake discusses himself is that if he dreams about accomplishing something, it's alone a amount of time till he gets it done. In 2001, defective any able acting experience, he went from actuality the alone adolescent of a grade-school-teacher distinct mom who was animate on affliction checks to a nationally accepted TV star, landing a advance role on the Canadian boyhood ball Degrassi: The Abutting Generation. In 2009, accepting gravitated adjoin music, Drake agape the American hip-hop boilerplate askew, afterlight the genre's affecting and agreeable cant with a aggregate of barbaric rapping and adaptable singing, blast blowing and flaying self-doubt. Drake, whose abounding name is Aubrey Drake Graham, austere a aisle for category-busting R&B artists like Frank Ocean, Miguel and the Weeknd, and in the action he became the bigger Jewish rapper aback the Beastie Boys. Bar mitzvahed in 1999, Drake charge be the alone pop artisan animate who can both recite from the Torah and get abroad with consistently application the chat "nigga" in his lyrics – his mother is white; his ancestor is black.
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Drake's coup, architecture on the archetype of Kanye West, was to affront prevailing notions about what array of accomplishments a rapper should appear from and what kinds of things he should rap about: On one about aboveboard song, he drunk-dials a above blaze and makes an ass of himself aggravating to woo her. Such accessible displays accept arrive acknowledgment from old-guard hip-hop gatekeepers (including, oddly, Common, who alleged Drake "soft") and bearding online hordes. "There's these GIFs about me, these brainless stereotypes bodies accept of me as this ever affecting appearance that cries in his allowance every night," says Drake. "There are jokes because of Degrassi, because I'm Canadian, because I accomplish music for women. There are memes of guys arrant to my music." He scowls, again shrugs. "I adulation it. I affection those photos aback I see them on Instagram."
Drake aloof able a civic bout for his platinum third album, Nothing Was the Same, and he's got some blow afore branch out to New York, area he'll accomplish at a Super Bowl concert organized by Diddy. Two nights ago, Drake blew off the Grammys alike admitting he was up for three awards, including one for Best Rap Album. He partied instead at a West Hollywood bistro area Rihanna was additionally blind out, which prompted a annular of online account – Rihanna and Drake were romantically complex years ago, but Drake says they're not anymore: "She's the ultimate fantasy. I mean, I anticipate about it. Like, 'Man, that would be good.' We accept fun together, she's air-conditioned and shit. But we're aloof friends. That's my dog for life." He says he doesn't accept a girlfriend. "I'm not afterwards bobcat like I was three years ago, aback I was aggravating to accomplish up for all the years aback no babe would allocution to me," he says. "But I haven't met somebody that makes everybody abroad not matter."
He had altered affidavit than Rihanna's aggregation for absence the Grammys. Afterwards he won Best Rap Anthology in 2013, for his additional album, Booty Care, he uploaded a video of himself jubilantly swigging booze from the statuette, actuality at the compound. His appearance of the awards has developed darker since. "It becomes added credible how extraneous our cast is to them," he says. "They were aggravating to advance me to advertise the show, requesting me to appear and accomplish 'Hold On We're Activity Home'" – his accident carol – "but they didn't appoint it for anything! They're calling me, e-mailing me every day to do some active achievement and accompany them viewers, but I didn't get a choice for Anthology of the Year. I didn't get a choice for Song of the Year."
Even if he had attended, he says, he'd accept appear up empty. Macklemore swept the rap awards this year, again fabricated accessible an acknowledgment that he'd texted to Kendrick Lamar, whose anthology Macklemore insisted was bigger than his own. "That $.25 was crank as fuck," Drake says. "I was like, 'You won. Why are you announcement your argument messages? Aloof chill. Booty your W, and if you feel you didn't deserve it, go get bigger – accomplish bigger music.' It acquainted cheap. It didn't feel genuine. Why do that? Why feel guilt? You anticipate those guys would pay admiration to you if they won? This is how the apple works: He fabricated a cast of music that appealed to added bodies than me, Hov, Kanye and Kendrick. Whether bodies wanna say it's racial, or whether it's aloof the actuality that he broke into article we can't tap into. That's aloof how the cards fall. Own your shit." Drake acquainted slighted by the acknowledgment too. "To aloof name Kendrick? That $.25 fabricated me feel funny. No, in that case, you beggared everybody. We all charge argument messages!"
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Drake wants to focus on milestones added than Grammys, like his contempo assignment as the host and agreeable bedfellow on Saturday Night Live. "I achievement it opens up some doors aback into acting," Drake says. He hammed it up winningly on the show, accustomed aggressive impressions of Lil Wayne and Katt Williams, and dabbling fun at his own biography: He rapped in one account about sipping Manischewitz. In accession sketch, the show's apparel administration outfitted him with tiny biscuit shorts in adjustment to portray a abhorrent theme-park employee. "When they showed them to me, I was like, 'These charge to be bristles inches shorter, because if we're gonna go in, let's go in – I'm not embarrassed,'" Drake says. For him, giving SNL his best was a adventitious to present himself as an all-around entertainer, and a adventitious to deride his nose, in a able new way, at the hip-hop cred police. "I capital to prove that there's ambit amid me and the bodies you accede to be my peers," he says. "I accept article special."
Drake's accomplishments isn't hardscrabble, but it's not afterwards struggle. His parents afar aback he was five; he says that his ancestor Dennis Graham's troubles with the law were the cause: "My dad was messing up appealing bad." Drake says Dennis was arrested on a brace of occasions, already appropriate in advanced of his son, for "drug-related actuality or, like, theft. He was a mover and a shaker, a hustler: If you had it, he could advertise it for you." In a song from 2009, Drake describes visiting Western Union to wire money to his dad, and apprehensive whether his father's professions of adulation are aboveboard or opportunistic.
Drake's mother, built-in Sandi Sher, confused with the adolescent Aubrey to several active apartments about Toronto, assuredly clearing in the basal bisected of a boondocks abode in the flush suburb of Forest Hill. Sandi slept on the aboriginal attic and Aubrey slept in the basement; they depended on banking advice from her brother, who had taken over the Sher ancestors business, accomplishment babyish mattresses, car seats and cribs. It was important to Sandi to accession Drake in a nice neighborhood, but, she says, "we were poor. I wasn't working, because I'd developed rheumatoid arthritis. I anticipate Aubrey able that he didn't accept an bequest he could depend on, and that he was activity to accept to do it himself." She recalls actuality adequately adamantine on her son, consistently active him to try harder. "We're apparently the alone ancestors that had four thesauruses in the house," she says. "I'd acquaint him, 'When you're cogent yourself, try and acquisition added words you can use.'" One day, aback Drake was about 10, Sandi entered his bedchamber and saw a augury of things to come: "Aubrey was continuing on the mattress, assuming that a toilet-paper cycle was a microphone, rapping these lyrics he'd written." Aback Drake hit it big, he bought Sandi an accommodation downtown; for her altogether this year, he denticulate her an arrangement with Beyoncé's claimed hairstylist.
At Forest Hill Collegiate Institute, a accessible aerial academy in his neighborhood, Drake advised himself an outcast. "It was all white Jewish kids, and it was tough," he says. "I didn't accept the affliction time, but I did accept a adamantine time. I was consistently the aftermost kid to get the allure to the party." He says he's "proud to be Jewish – not on some Orthodox shit, but I bless holidays with my family." Classmates, however, lobbed the chat "schvartze," a Yiddish accusation adjoin blacks, at him. He transferred to Vaughan Road Academy, area he says the apprentice anatomy was added diverse. "There were kids that were cutting anniversary added and kids that were equestrian champions," Drake says. "Actors, skiers, rappers. It was great."
Sandi enrolled Drake in tap and ballet courses as a little kid; later, he performed in youth-theater productions of Les Misérables and The Wizard of Oz. One of his aerial academy classmates was the son of a aptitude agent, who helped Drake book his Degrassi gig, arena a accepted amateur alleged Jimmy Brooks. His bacon was bashful by showbiz standards, but acceptable money for a teenager: "Between 40 and 60 thousand per season," Drake says. "As anon as he absolved in, there was article absorbing about him," recalls Stephanie Cohen, who was a Degrassi abettor director. "He had a aplomb and a charm, alike admitting he wasn't experienced. His aboriginal episodes weren't the best abundantly accomplished, but he got better. He was accessible to notes. He would listen."
Drake threw himself into acting, but music was in his blood. His ancestor had been a affair bagman who already played with Jerry Lee Lewis; his uncles accommodate Larry Graham, the bassist for Sly and the Ancestors Stone, and Mabon "Teenie" Hodges, who co-wrote "Love and Happiness," amid added songs, with Al Green. "I've got crazy ancestors history – my grandmother acclimated to bouncer for Aretha Franklin," Drake says. During summer breaks, Dennis would drive Drake bottomward to Memphis in a cloth-upholstered Mercury Cougar, introducing him to archetypal body and R&B on the car stereo. It was Dennis who aboriginal told Drake to advance his singing in accession to his rhyming, giving him an bend over the competition.
As Drake's interests swung adjoin hip-hop, he began booking flat time. He aesthetic a agreeable appearance afflicted by the bouncy sonics and anesthetic -cadences of Dirty South rap, immersing himself in Three 6 Mafia and Yo Gotti mixtapes he bought during Memphis vacations. About 2008, Jas Prince, a Houston hip-hop impresario, begin Drake on MySpace and anesthetized his music to Lil Wayne. Impressed, Wayne put Drake on a alike for a meeting. He met Wayne on his bout bus, Drake says, "and I never got off."
"Please put your boots and any afar altar you're accustomed into this bin, and lie down," a woman in a white lab covering instructs Drake. He's been absent to analysis out the James Turrell attendant at the Los Angeles County Architecture of Art while he's in town, and his bodies accept appointed him a guided visit. The septuagenarian Turrell is a adept architect of optical phenomena: He'll abolish chunks of bank from a allowance to anatomy the sky in amazing ways, or actualize illusionistic amplitude application projections. "I fuck with Turrell," Drake says. "He was a big access on the visuals for my aftermost tour." Drake bliss off his Timberlands, advancing to access a allotment alleged "Perceptual Cell," in which lab-coated "technicians" accelerate the eyewitness on a accumbent bed into a bankrupt metal globe, central which high-pitched, absonant complete plays through headphones and a consciousness-expanding exhausted assaults the eyes.
Twelve disorienting account later, Drake emerges wide-eyed. "All my questions about activity are answered!" he says. "I fabricated this antic advanced that I should accept smoked a edgeless first, but I'm animated I didn't. I would accept absent my shit." Drake's co-manager Oliver El-Khatib, a angular Canadian of Icelandic and Lebanese descent, is up next. Drake gives him a tip: "Yo – at the beginning, booty off one of the headphones, aloof so you apperceive it'll be all appropriate and that you're not gonna lose your mind." Drake turns to me. "I absolutely capital to booty a account in there. Instagram it, like, 'Perceptual Cell' selfie! That would accept been the ultimate stunt."
Drake is absorbed in art, but he scoffs at how contemporary art shout-outs accept become in rap. "It's like Hov can't bead confined these canicule afterwards at atomic four art references!" he says. "I would adulation to aggregate at some point, but I anticipate the able rap/art apple affair is accepting affectionate of corny."
Inside the abutting installation, a LACMA adviser alleged Jason says article like, "If you attending continued enough, you'll apprehension that your faculty of abyss begins to . . . ," but Drake is active accepting his abettor breeze pictures of him. In one shot, Drake throws up his accoutrements in a crucifix pose; he gazes off morosely in another. Aback he's done, we accomplish our way through the blow of the retrospective. Museumgoers stop and bore as Drake drifts past. One aegis bouncer calls out, "I adulation your shit!"
"How abundant would it be to get a 'Perceptual Cell' for your house?" Drake asks Jason. "Twenty million?"
"Wow, I don't know," Jason says. "Turrell does do residential commissions, though."
"I'm gonna acquisition out," Drake says.
On Wilshire Boulevard, alfresco the museum, a bear in an SUV is cat-and-mouse to booty Drake to a West Hollywood boom parlor. "People don't apperceive I accept tats, because I accumulate them hidden," he says. On his larboard close bicep he's got the CN Tower, authentication of the Toronto skyline; beyond his aback are ample portraits of his mother, his affectionate grandmother and Aaliyah, on whom Drake modeled his own aboriginal access to singing. At the parlor, Drake's boom artisan is Doctor Woo, a handsome Chinese-American guy with a rockabilly haircut. Drake presents Woo with one of his father's mug shots, which he believes is from the Seventies. The account is amazing: bristling handlebar mustache, huge eyeglasses, coxcomb grin. Drake wants it active on his appropriate tricep. "I adulation this," Woo says. "He's like, 'Yeahhh, I did it.'"
Drake describes his accepted accord with his dad with a affectionate of aware weariness. They adhere out – at restaurants, at band clubs. Drake has rapped about administration a alcohol with Dennis, admitting preferring his aggregation sober. "With my dad, it's a tossup," he says. "We're gonna absorb some time. Could be better, could be worse, but I adulation him, so whatever it is, I'll accord with it.
"If he absolved in actuality appropriate now, he'd ablaze up the room," Drake tells Woo. "He'd be bedlam afore he said anything, dressed to the nines, color-coordinated." He smiles at the thought. "I anticipate that's area I get it from."
At the southern bend of Drake's patio lies a brace of French doors covered by a thick, atramentous curtain. Behind them is his home studio, area he and his longtime collaborator, the Toronto-born ambassador Noah "40" Shebib, get assignment done aback they're in town. Every Drake anthology starts with a chat amid the two. "I attending to 40 to atom the anthology off," Drake says. "Give me a beat. What does this anthology complete like? Again we alpha accepting beats and affair files from added producers and aces them apart, demography the $.25 and pieces we like."
Unlike, say, Lil Wayne, who usually extemporizes on the microphone, Drake writes out every chat of his rhymes. "I'm actual accurate about bar structure, area article ends, area it begins," he says. Drake ability "go on Wikipedia and analysis my shit," to ensure that a advertence is correct. He composes on his phone, area he keeps a certificate with every able abstraction that occurs to him. 40 says that aback Drake is working, "he'll sit in the flat by himself with his laptop accessible and his BlackBerry in his hand. The beat's on, maybe an hour goes by, and suddenly, he yells out, '40! 40! I'm ready!'"
For Nothing Was the Same, afterwards starting actuality in Hidden Hills, Drake decamped to Toronto, area he appointed four studios and put a aggregation of songwriters and producers, abounding of them Canadian up-and-comers, into motion. "It was a connected factory," he says. Alive in his hometown helps to arena him, he says, and lends a acute atmosphere: "Hell charge feel like how Toronto feels on any accustomed winter day, and winter lasts seven months. It's my admired abode in the world, but there's this cold, gloomy, aphotic vibe. It produces a assertive sound."
Rather than enlisting covering producers, Drake prefers alive with about unknowns, like Mike Zombie, who produced the album's snarlingly acrimonious advance single, "Started From the Bottom." "It's about award what's next," Drake says. A loyal centralized aggregation additionally offers him secrecy: "I'm afraid to let bodies apperceive what producers I'm fucking with, what I'm rapping about. I'd rather bead that acceptable duke out of nowhere." Drake admires the way that Beyoncé kept everybody in the aphotic about her contempo album. He co-wrote and sang on one of its tracks, "Mine," and alike he had no abstraction that the LP was advancing anytime soon. "They were absolutely ambiguous about it," he says. One Thursday aftermost December, a affiliate of Beyoncé's aggregation flew to Chicago, area Drake was performing, to comedy him the "Mine" video and get his approval. "I said, 'That's cool,' she bankrupt her laptop absolute fast, absolved off and got on the phone," Drake says. "By the time I came offstage, the anthology was out. Beyoncé was like, 'I'm so apologetic I couldn't acquaint you!'"
When Drake hears a song he wishes he'd made, "I get physically sick," he says, adding, "It doesn't appear often." It happened in 2011, aback he heard Jay Z and Kanye West's "Ni**as in Paris," from Watch the Throne. "I was like, 'How did I not anticipate of that?' – 'Ball so hard, that $.25 cray!' It was absolute rap shit, but it acquainted melodic; all the cadences acquainted so good." The song anon aggressive "Started From the Bottom," he says, arduous him to appear up with a rapped angle aloof as addictive as a articulate one.
Drake is on acceptable agreement with Jay Z and Kanye. "Kanye and me are friends; we're acute on accepting some assignment done together," Drake says, and Jay, who will argument him words of encouragement, afresh alleged him the "Kobe Bryant" of hip-hop. Not continued ago, though, the air amid the three seemed cooler, with Drake and the brace trading agilely buried barbs in their music. "I'm aloof activity like the head is for the demography – watch me booty it," Drake rapped in one such moment of provocation. (Hov-baiting accent added.) "It was a abridgement of advice commutual with accustomed competitiveness," Drake says, answer the friction. "When article awe-inspiring is accident in advanced of me" – i.e., the Head anthology – "and everyone's advantageous absorption to that, you gotta say, 'I'm still here.' But those two are gods to me." What smoothed things over with Kanye was a favor-trade: The Chicago MC asked Drake to accomplish at a clandestine altogether affair for "some kid," Drake says; Drake, in turn, asked Kanye to bead in on OVO, Drake's anniversary Toronto festival, area they exchanged praise, and a big hug, onstage.
Their patched-up accord doesn't exclude criticism. For instance, Drake says that he was clashing about Kanye's aftermost album, Yeezus. "There were some absolute ambiguous confined on there," he says. "Like that 'Swaghili' line? Appear on, man. Alike Fabolous wouldn't say some $.25 like that." But Drake says he speaks from a basement of abysmal respect: "Kanye's the acumen I'm here. I adulation aggregate about that guy."
In a few days, Drake will booty a clandestine jet to the freezing East, to accomplish at Diddy's Super Bowl concert. It's activity to be adamantine to leave California. The sky over Hidden Hills appropriate now is a clement blue, the acclimate is warm, and the not-unpleasant balm of dust and horse admixture floats in on a affable breeze. "There are a lot of horse owners about here," Drake says, sitting in his yard.
The ambience is calm, but there's an afraid activity about Drake. Abutting ages he'll barrage a European tour, but, he says, "I'm accessible to go to Europe now. I could go appropriate now and do 10 nights at the O2 Arena. I'm hungry!" He nibbles on a allotment of banana. "The added night, one of my acceptable friends, Terrence Ross, scored, like, 51 credibility for the Raptors. Bodies were activity crazy, rejoicing: 'This guy is up next!' I was that guy at one point – auspicious and new and bodies capital me to win. But it's like, there are guys that do that every night, and bodies get annoyed of them accomplishing it. I feel like bodies are annoyed of me accomplishing 40, 50 points. I gotta go put up 100 in one night for bodies to say, 'Damn!'"
Whether Drake's cerebration about chicken GIFs, Grammy snubs or 100-point games, he seems to augment off a abysmal close able-bodied of animus – a faculty that, for all his success, he's still underappreciated. "It's funny. I bethink I acclimated to accept this mentality area I'd be at the Grammys or at the MTV awards, sitting at my seat, saying, 'Oh, God, I achievement they abolish my performance, or maybe the date will breach and I won't accept to do this tonight – I'm nervous.' Like, on tour, I'd say, 'I achievement article happens area they accept to bright the building, and we'll get one night off.' This was aboriginal on, about the aboriginal album."
He leans advanced in his chair, thwacking a approach adjoin the aback of his added duke for emphasis. "But now I'm aloof like, 'Man, I achievement they accord me bristles added minutes.'"
This adventure is from the February 27th, 2014 affair of Rolling Stone.
