If you’ve ever been to a frat party, it’s quite likely that you’ve heard “Juicy,” the Notorious BIG’s ubiquitous ode to struggle and redemption. If you’ve ever held a red solo cup filled with André champagne in a circle of friends and rapped along, you have no doubt heard the line, “Thinkin' back on my one-room shack / Now my mom pimps a Ac' with minks on her back.” “Juicy” is full of lines like this; they compare the blight of the past to the insane extravagance of the present. He and his mother used to live in a really shitty apartment, but now it's all good because she drives an Acura and wears fur. It’s a song about nostalgia, sure, but it looks warmly at the past while being thankful of the fact that it's over. It's a little strange, or maybe even a little bit infuriating, that a song about overcoming intense poverty is so popular with college students who have never dealt with real poverty and have most likely been sitting in Acuras for most of their lives.The problem is that such an exclusionary interpretation of “Juicy” doesn’t necessarily give Big enough credit. Those who have spent time with his biography will know that the imagery in “Juicy” is actually mostly fabricated. I would not attempt to make light of the deep consequences of growing up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant of the 1980’s, but as a child, Biggie had a reputation for being the kid that had it good. He lived in a really nice building and his Mom always had food on the table. In fact, she has explained in interviews that the “one room shack” story is just that—a story—and it contains very little factual truth about Christopher Wallace’s childhood.The artifice of hip-hop shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who is a fan of the genre, and I don’t need to spend more time explaining that as a general concept. My point, however, is that the “struggle” narrative in hip-hop, while deeply rooted in real situations, is just as malleable a framework as the “I fuck a lot of women” narrative. What makes Drake’s new song “Started from the Bottom” particularly interesting is not that its story is fabricated, but that Drake could have fabricated a much more sob-worthy story for himself than getting yelled at by his uncle and working at CVS.Instead of diving head-first into a story of real suffering, Drake has taken the very broad and thorny topic of struggle in hip-hop, isolated a very specific element of it, and blown it up to life-sized proportions. The narrative of the song goes like this: young Drake dreams big, so he’s forced to do mildly unpleasant things like work nights and steal his uncle’s car in order to eventually become a famous and successful rapper. He looks back at these events with a smirk because these days, he’s making millions and winning at little league soccer looks like small potatoes from that kind of distance. Yes, the song is a proof of legitimacy, but it isn’t hardship that anoints Drake, it’s the progress of maturation, the journey from desire to accomplishment: “Boys tell stories about the man / Say I never struggled, wasn't hungry, yeah, I doubt it, n*gga.” Set it against heavier songs like “Juicy” or Ghostface’s “All That I Got Is You” and not only is there no contest, the songs simply aren’t even in the same category. Big and Ghost make you want to cry. Drake makes you want to get shit done.
In a broader cultural landscape, “Started from the Bottom” and its accompanying video actually fit much more comfortably alongside HBO shows like Girls or Sex and the City in their unapologetic embrace of middle class values. Both shows manage to humanize and illuminate the lives of people who, in the parlance of many, it is generally assumed we have a right to hate. These shows are able to rake in sizable niche audiences, however, because they do what most other comedies don’t: acknowledge the realness of the lives of the well-off. Thus, the upper middle class and people who aspire to be upper middle class relate to them like nothing else. Drake’s new video is particularly similar in this regard, because like Lena Dunham, Drake presents what is in the end a very serious examination of middle class life with a smirk that allows middle class audiences to both enjoy and relate to it without feeling bad about their similarity to the silly shit on screen. And ultimately, while I don’t think anyone would look at the night manager at CVS as a particularly pity-worthy person, a refusal to acknowledge that somebody might not be having a great time in that job position is equally delusional.Whether or not you can enjoy a song such as “Started from the Bottom” (or Girls and Sex and the City for that matter) really comes down to a deep political stance. Is it really possible to translate a populist narrative of the downtrodden, an elemental story about the basic needs of life like food and clothing, into a mildly wistful story about bourgie Canadian suburbanites who have yet to accomplish their personal dreams? If you’re a straight-up Marxist, the answer is going to be a resounding “Fuck you.” Whether or not you feel like Drake’s new song and video are particularly poignant, however, it’s pretty undeniable that those college kids drinking the shitty boose and doing a bad job of avoiding the n-word might just have something more appropriate to rap along to now.Colin Small's favorite song of all time is "Started from the Bottom." Just kidding, it's something else. You should follow him on Twitter - @ColinSSmall
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