2019 has been a relatively slow year for marquee releases, but hip-hop’s burgeoning stars and sonically ambitious adherents have flourished more than ever without the overhanging presence of huge names like Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, and Drake — or have they? While rap’s A-list has been conspicuously absent, I couldn’t help noticing an uptick in the use of diaspora sounds in releases like Beyonce’s Lion King companion, The Gift, Jidenna’s 85 To Africa, IDK’s Is He Real? and Goldlink’s Diaspora. Going back a year or two, Kendrick Lamar heavily mined the styles and sounds of the continent for the Black Panther soundtrack, while Swae Lee dabbled in Nigerian Afrobeats and Caribbean styles on his solo portion of Rae Sremmurd’s SR3MM.
In trying to determine a starting point to this particular wave of an admittedly cyclical trend, I came to a startling realisation. It turned out that the modern version of the trend could be traced to a specific, much-maligned release in 2016. For all the flak given to Drake for his “dud” album Views, here we are, three years later, with multiple artists, hailing from all over the map crafting albums that sound a lot like One Dance and Too Good and Controlla. In a year where Drake’s artistic presence has been minimal, his influence has still resonated throughout music in intriguing ways. It seems that, as always, if we want to know where hip-hop is today, we have to look at what we were all laughing at Drake for doing three years ago.
There’s little debate that the Canadian star has been rap’s number one trendsetter since he arrived in 2009 with So Far Gone and most of that comes from folks who just can’t process the cognitive dissonance between Drake’s corniness and his stunningly consistent ability to set the agenda for the culture at large. Yes, Drake is a cornball. We know it. He knows it. It’s no secret. But why should that hinder his prominence in pop culture? Lots of popular things are corny in hindsight: high-top fades, extravagantly baggy jeans with NBA logo patches, 90 percent of memes — especially ones with built-in dances. Even President Obama was pretty cheesy. That doesn’t mean we didn’t revel in their ubiquity nor that we don’t remember them fondly now.
