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Music

In Which I Receive a Drake Tattoo and Realize I No Longer Give a Shit About Drake

Shits are finite, and doing something that takes giving a REALLY big shit (like, y’know, getting a tattoo) is a good way to run out of shits to give.

On September 22nd, I woke up with a Drake tattoo that I’d gotten on purpose. On September 23rd, I woke up depressed, because over the course of 24 hours I’d come to the realization that I sort of couldn’t stand Drake. Regardless of how I currently feel about him, the word “STARTED.”—period and all, is etched into the skin of my upper left leg, three inches from my flaccid penis, forever, until I die, and even after I die, remaining seared upon my shriveled corpse until my leg decomposes into nothingness along with the remainder of my corporeal form and I lapse into oblivion. It really fucking sucks.

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I suppose that I’m the sort of dude who’s predisposed to like Drake. I’m fascinated by celebrity as an abstract, transformative force upon a person’s life, something Drake seems pretty invested in. His career is based on the idea that he’s a regular-enough dude who’s found himself in the world of mainstream hip-hop, where every possible knob is turned up to 11. Everyone has their “thing”—Rick Ross sells crack from his yacht on the moon, Lil Wayne is not a human being, Future is a sad astronaut, etc. Drake’s “thing” is he’s got a metric fuck-ton of feelings. It’s funny and self-aware, and more than a little ridiculous. He challenges the paradigms of mainstream hip-hop subtly from within, and his words have a way of sticking with you long after the song’s over.

But those are just words. That’s just why someone might hypothetically like Drake; it can’t explain why I felt strongly enough about his music to get “STARTED.” tattooed on my skin, which is a thing an actual crazy person would do. One of the most fascinating elements of Drake’s public persona is that he’s constantly proving to his fans that he’s living the dream, enjoying a perfect life. If he hadn’t released a video of he and his friends taking shots out of his Grammy, then did it actually happen? If he hadn’t started publicly palling around with his dad, how could his reconciliation with his father be real? If he didn’t turn a drunken, pleading phone conversation with a girl into “Marvin’s Room,” then why even bother having the drunken, pleading phone conversation in the first place? Drake innately understands how to live in public in the post-post-post-modern era. Though he is a musician, he’s a pitchman first and foremost, and the product he’s pushing is himself, his narrative, his life. True fans of Drake don’t just consume the music. They consume him, and he, symbiotically, consumes them. It’s like being taken over by The Thing.

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It’s the holidays, which I always like because I get to see my family, who inadvertently remind me that I’m a total psycho. One of my cousins is a cop; another is in med school; my little cousin was the star of his high school fishing team in Alabama. These are worthwhile things, ways to engage with the world and make a difference, at very least get in tune with nature. I, meanwhile, write about rap music on the internet. If I say something about rap music that enough people love (or hate), then I have done a good job.

This concern with pleasing others over the self can, if you let it, consume your life to the point where suddenly everything you do is somehow performative. This isn’t Drake’s fault, but it sort of is. In the age of social media, anyone can become a public figure, simply by virtue of screaming loud enough and reminding enough people that you exist, to distract yourself from the inevitability of death by creating a hermetically sealed bubble in which you seem to matter. I live on Twitter, to the point where if I don’t tweet for three days, someone will text me to make sure I’m not dead. My friends and I can’t just have fun, we have to tweet about our mishaps, instagram ourselves having a good time, or else we haven’t instilled the requisite amount of FOMO in our peers so it doesn’t count. Doesn’t matter if we were too busy proving to others that we were having fun to fully appreciate the experience for its own inherent worth.

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The way I followed Drake’s career—obsessively, as if I were trying to collect clues to a mystery that had not yet occurred—is symptomatic of how many of us use the internet, mired in a constant feedback loop, tracking and commenting on information that is of no actual significance for our lives. Does Drake care that I exist? Verily, nay. Does he care that I have one of his lyrics tattooed on my skin? Fuck no (but he would probably be a little creeped out by the fact that said lyric is so close to my balls).

It’s the end of the year, and given the staggering amount of coverage we’ve devoted to Drake throughout the 2013—the overwhelming amount of it positive, the majority of it my directive—you’d think we’d be declaring Nothing Was the Same the album of the year, or at least devoting some space to its prowess. Because, really, it is totally proficient at the things it’s trying to do. It is Peak Drake. But enjoyment of a musician is not objective. It always comes down whether or not you can muster up a shit to give about whoever’s making the music, or if that music can inspire within your soul a shit truly worth giving. I cared so much about the dude’s truly meaningless comings and goings, writing about nearly every single move he made with painstaking detail. I got the tattoo two days before I was set to shadow Drake for a longform profile of him. I was in the thick of exploring every psychic nook and cranny, and I was turning over gigantic piles of nothing. Yet his plastic, sterile emptiness inspired me to keep looking, and my temporary obsession with figuring out what, exactly, was Drake’s deal is probably what caused me to get the tattoo. Giving a shit about the shit you give a shit about gives that shit power over your shit. But shits are finite, and doing something that takes giving a REALLY big shit (like, y’know, getting a tattoo) is a good way to run out of shits to give.

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The first two days I had the tattoo were incredibly weird for me. I was wracked by the knowledge I’d committed an act that could not be undone (my mom saw a picture of it on Instagram, she was pissed), and confronted with a physical, permanent reminder of a fandom that was more than probably fleeting (imagine if I’d gotten a fucking Grateful Dead tattoo when I was into jam bands in high school or something). I wanted to distance myself from the dude completely. Which is fine—ultimately, having a stupid, albeit completely hidden, tattoo inspired by a rapper is a funny story that doesn’t actually totally ruin your life, even if you decide that rapper sucks. But, of course, I still had to meet Drake, and write about him. Which I did. And after I pressed “publish” on my story, I put Drake out of my mind and haven’t looked back.

When I sat down to write this essay, I tried putting on Nothing Was the Same to jog my memory, to stir up feelings of why I had to stop listening to him. It didn’t. It just made me feel stupid. Listening to Drake reminds me of the person I no longer wish to be. It makes me worry that the internet might slowly be destroying my life. It makes me feel guilty in advance for hoping for retweets and compliments and shares on this article, as if the validation of others will justify whether writing this was worthwhile to me. It makes me start thinking of different ways to spin the meaning of my tattoo before remembering it’s always going to be a Drake tattoo and I have learn to deal with that. It makes me worry I might be in too deep to escape. So, instead of forcing myself to slog through the entirety of a Drake album again just to say I fuckin’ did it, I put on some jazz, started writing, and got on with my life.

Photo by Lauren Nostro

Yes, that's Drew and his tattoo with a picture of Drake covering his junk. He's on Twitter - @drewmillard