194 words about Drake

Specifically, "late-night Drake."

Imagine a grand schema of Drakes, a dot-matrix of personas. The best Drake is late-night Drake. Zoom in and there are more: There is "pouring candlewax on the small of your back" late-night Drake, there is "leaving embarrassing voicemails" late-night Drake, and there is "clear-eyed confessional" late-night Drake. It is this last Drake I am concerned with: accepting a second highball on an overnight flight, exhausted after a long day doing Drake activities but too medium-enervated to sleep yet. It's Notes-app rap, written from a place where all the Drakes cohere. These tracks are often named after a time and place or close an album, but not always: to wit, the new "Lemon Pepper Freestyle," a mahogany six-minute stretch, replete with Rick Ross prologue, in which Drake connects doofy class photos to his own imagined funeral, admits he's never committed a crime but insists his friends have, and name-drops relentlessly, fielding questions from his kid's teachers as to whether or not he knows Beyonce. The brief pause before he puffs, "Of course," is a reminder that the only real Drake is actor Drake, still playing to the camera even when he doesn't want to.