Drake Watched 'Phantom Thread'
Yet another culture he’s appropriating. (Mine)
Four weeks since he was called a pedophile onstage at the nation’s biggest entertainment event and the song labeling him as such won Grammys for record and song of the year, best rap performance and song, Drake has reemerged on the internet. Reemerged, I mean, for something other than a sports gambling ad.
From the mixed1-up files of Aubrey Drake Graham: In a nine-slide carousel, the rapper recounts his recent goings on. There’s a photo of Drake wearing a mink coat to sit on his laptop in the club. There’s a photo of two Zofran pills, a prescription drug used “to prevent nausea and vomiting that is caused by cancer medicines (chemotherapy) or radiation therapy,” per the Mayo Clinic. There are multiple photos of him pursing his lips into the camera, as he’s wont to do. (The federal lawsuit he has filed against UMG, and the legal petition he filed regarding iHeartMedia did not make the cut. Neither did his entrance into an Australian tour stop where he wore a hoodie punctured with bullet holes and smoking.2)
The caption is cryptic and just so boy. “U know I grew up non confrontational” — code for Canadian? — “and always treated this game as a sport where my pen won gold, but my these days the podium has been hard for all of us to ignore,” he wrote. “I understand that this next chapter may leave you feeling uneasy, but I hope you see my honesty as clarity not charity that answers some questions especially about the unanswered texts you’ve been sending me. 😮💨”
“My these days the podium has been hard for all of us to ignore” is something Joe Biden, 82 years old, would say about losing the presidential election. “I hope you see my honesty as clarity not charity…” not that I’m giving notes, but I think it’s funnier to categorize “making music for the radio, frat mixers, and men who complain about women wearing makeup” as “charity.” Anyway: I can’t wait to see what kind of fake-deep interlude lobbies for sympathy on the album he’s threatening.
In the fifth slide, however, Drake included a shot from Phantom Thread, the Paul Thomas Anderson movie from 2017. “I cannot begin my day with a confrontation,” Daniel Day-Lewis-as-Reynolds Woodcock sighs when a lover asks why he’s pulled away from her. (“If breakfast isn’t right it’s very hard for him to recover for the rest of the day,” his sister explains later to that first lover’s replacement after Reynolds storms out following another soured breakfast.) The genius of Phantom Thread is that Reynolds is as tiresome as he is winsome: fussy, bossy, determined, exacting, judgemental, impatient, loves going nonverbal, occasionally outright rude. (Does that remind you of anyone?) What I’m getting at is this: Drake has found a new culture to appropriate. Mine!
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