Drake: Rap Game Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell Edition)

"Hold On, We're Going Home."

Drake's austere, absurdist video for "Hold On, We're Going Home" is a Miami crime flick mash-up in which Drizzy and team roll up on a bunch of creeps who've kidnapped his girlfriend and take them out with automatic weapons. Director Bill Pope takes the luxuriating in sleaze steez of the

Miami Vice

television show and combines it with just enough nods to Brian DePalma's

Scarface

, and then, extensively

the shootout finale of Michael Mann's movie version of Miami Vice

.

This is the second Drake video to pay homage to Mann's Miami Vice. 2011's “I'm On One,” directed by Gil Green, placed Drake, DJ Khaled, and company in a swanky apartment overlooking Miami that looked exactly like the safe house Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, and company cooped up in to regroup in the 2006 movie. Hell, Drake's “skin tanned… hair long” look in the video isn't all that different from Colin Farrell's handsome dirtbag look, you know? 'Aughties Sonny Crockett, intensely emotional yet cocksure, and looking like a metrosexual Jimmy Buffet bro is an attitudinal touchstone for Drake, it would seem.

Director Pope pairing of Miami Vice nods with references to Scarface, the ultimate rapper movie, is clever because Miami Vice has actually become something of a hip-hop classic itself. Ace Hood's video for “Bugatti” (also directed by Gil Green), plays out like one of Miami Vice's action scenes on foot. And the nervous off-the-cuff clip for Trinidad Jame$ and Go Dreamer's “Who's Jokin'?” featuring the rappers on the top of a building, storm brewing behind them, references the scene in Miami Vice where Crockett and Tubbs meet Lieutenant Castillo on top of a parking garage, lightning flashing in the background. Rappers it would seem, have more discerning taste than most film critics who dismissed the heady reboot's attitude and couldn't figure out its oscillation between glitzy excess and third world grit (a very rapper-like dichotomy).

Let's take a moment to appreicate: Don Jonson, Colin Farrell, Drake. One in the same?

An Interlude: Five Equally Dumb Ideas for the “Hold On, We're Going Home” Video
1. Riffing on a far more fitting scene from Mann's Miami Vice: A faithful recreation of the ending of the movie when Colin Farrell as Crockett and Gong Li as Isabella cry on the beach together as Mogwai's piano-pounding bummer jam “Auto Rock” plays. Afterwards, Drake rushes to the hospital to hold the hand of an ailing Lil Wayne.

2. Your boy Aubrey gets retro jiggy with it and dances on a table to “Hold On, We're Going Home” in the same awkward manner that Philip Michael Thomas as Ricardo Tubbs danced to Rockwell's “Somebody's Watching Me,” in the pilot episode of Miami Vice. 3. A recreation of another 2000s movie nobody really cares about Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World. Drake and his “crew,” have to fight some gnarly pirates played by G.B.E. goonies like Fredo Santana, who've kidnapped Drizzy's gurl. Drake literally plays a sea captain named “Captain Save-a-Hoe.” 4. A homage to the Replacements' trollish, one-take “Bastards of Young” video. Drake sits on a leather couch slowly smoking a blunt. The camera is behind him. We see only the back of his head, the blunt slowly burning out. Scarface plays on the television.
5. October's Very Own holds one of those stupid “make your own video” fan-bait contests that never work out and requests Drake fanatics take footage from #feelingz-filled neon noir Drive, and cut and remix that shit to “Hold On, We're Going Home.” The winner ambitiously edits all of the Albert Brooks footage so that it looks like Brooks singing the lyrics of the Nothing Was The Same slow-burner because dawg, if you think about it, Drake looks and kind of dresses like Albert Brooks.

Anyways! You'd be best to file “Hold On, We're Going Home” next to other high concept Drake music video half-#fails like “Best I Ever Had” (which is pretty much “LOL BEWBS”) and “HYFR” (which is pretty much “LOL JEWS”). At least celebrate it for its stonefaced humor because the bonkers qualities of “Hold On” are at least in part, a joke, right? Certainly, it's ultraviolent deadpan is preferable to the ol' fashioned, broad Benny Hill objectification comedy that derails the middle of “Started From The Bottom,” an otherwise pretty ideal presentation of Drake's rarefied swag.

Still, “Hold On, We're Going Home” works because who knows what the hell to make of the thing. Is it a riff on Drake's “soft” reputation? It is dissociative and downright hilarious to see him wield a gun and shoot a dude in the head, for sure. Is this just Drake continuing his fascimiles of ballin' out of control 90s rap videos, which he previously indulged in the VHS wobbling “No New Friends”? “Hold On” is very much in the key of half-epic, full stop hammy, sound effects clouding the actual song and all, bad taste auteurism, of say, Puff Daddy's “Victory.” Maybe it's just a quasi-sequel in concept to the recent Rich Gang video for “50 Plates," a recreation of the robbery in another Michael Mann movie, 1995's Heat. Or perhaps it's an oblique representation of Drake's low key misogyny in which the women in his songs who lack agency, here, are reduced to someone who needs literal saving from the bad guys of the world. “Hold On, We're Going Home” is another perplexing piece of the “Drake either has no idea what he's doing, or really, really knows what he's doing” puzzle.

[Editor's Note: So, it is the end of Drake Week. We've had The Kid Mero and @Seinfeld2000 talk about him, made a dude listen to him for the first time, thought about his clothes, his hair, his music videos, and his sheer Canadian-ness. The week culminated in Grand Theft Aubrey, Drew Millard's profile of him. But we haven't heard the case against Drake. For this, we turn to Barry Schwartz, a man living in Long Island who once told us, "If Drake is the voice of your generation, then everything terrible people say about your generation is true." Here is why one man thinks Drake is poison.]