Zach Baron wraps up a slick, strategically-written defense of Drake over at the Village Voice.  Here’s his “whaaa?” kicker, which is quite brilliant actually:

Like the similarly loathed Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola, who have eloquently staked out the territory of upper-middle-class malaise in cinema, Drake’s done the same thing in rap. How much this bothers you probably depends on how much the upper-middle-class bothers you. But that’s your problem, not his.

It’s a nice rhetorical move that more or less equates Drake’s dispatches from the frontlines of 2010 pop stardom (and his background as a child actor with connected folks) with the “upper-middle-class malaise” of The Royal Tenenbaums or The Virgin Suicides.  And if you’re uncomfortable with that, the argument goes, well, maybe that’s the point of the art.

Of course, this is a highly superficial comparison made to prove another point, and which does no real justice to any of the artists or works he mentions.  It elides the actual art in favor of the context of the art (which is sort of what Drake himself does too…I’ll get to that in a second), skimming over the fact that neither of those films were about the authors’ own lives (nor do their plots have anything to do with Drake’s self-obsessed celeb culture fascinations).

All this is to say that it’s unfair for Baron to imply that that disliking Drake comes out of a particular classist worldview that listeners might be struggling with and unconsciously projecting.  The class point relates to the rockist one that Baron makes earlier in the post–critics can handle “struggle” in rap narratives, but not Drake’s tales of upper-middle-class connections and pop machinations–though the rockism thing is something I’m really not as interested in.

Drake is a whiner, which isn’t exactly a new thing in pop, but it’s the style and content of his whining that gets me.*  His first official LP, the one that enters him into the pop star arms race, is wholly made up of meta-level reflections of his own pop stardom, along with the cultural and socio-economic machinations that brought him here.  Which brings me to the important question: and? What I find so unpleasant about Drake is what I dislike so much about 2010-era pop culture in general: meta-level oversharing as art (and celebrity) itself, with precious little else to hold onto.

In other words, Thank Me Later isn’t pulling from the tragi-comic, semi-sweet upper-middle class narrative style of Coppola or Anderson, not even close.  Instead, it’s the new “reality rap,” and I’ve no doubt that lots of people are going to love it, in the same way that lots of people love watching others make pseudo-stars out of themselves in the sterilized world of reality television, former celebrities try to pull themselves back up to a lost level of fame by humiliating themselves in the same venue, or incessantly sharing mundane “thoughts” on Twitter.  Drake’s story is unique and interesting, but he leverages it within this framework.  He’s complaining about the trials and tribulations of being the lead member of rap’s 2010 nouveau riche on the same album that proves that point, and you’re not a rockist or classist for finding this irritating.

On a bad day, I’d call Drake rap’s Ashton Kutcher.  But to be honest, Drake’s a talented guy who’s made an incredibly boring album-about-making-an-album and the tiresome celebrity culture that comes with it. What’s important about that is that this whole thing so perfectly reflects 2010–in all the wrong ways.  Thank Me Later to be brief, is only possible at a particular time when we too often don’t really care about the actual content of a pop star’s icon or personality or art as much as we want to know what they think about it.

*There are many other, much more musical things I don’t like about this album, but I’ll leave those for later, or for others.

Re: this post (see comments for a bit more explanation, and the first comment in particular for some good ol’ fashioned indienet anono-snark).  I don’t really want to explain in detail what I’m looking for; I’d rather find stuff and have that stuff explain what I’m looking for to me, if that makes sense.  (I have no idea who this band is, by the way, and I’ve only heard about 30% of the music made by the bands in the previous post.  Not a central criterion)

Climax Blues Band, “Couldn’t Get It Right,” British Television, 1976.  This was one of those one-hit Classic Rock tunes that got lots of spin on the radio when I was a teenager.  Whatever Steely Dan planted in me about 2 years earlier, these guys further sowed.  It’s all in that slo-mo bare bones bar funk riff, which the lead singer bodies here in the laconic, effortlessly stoney manner known mainly to, well, Zoot.

Chris Weingarten, at the Voice, chatting with Brooklyn rap duo Super Chron Flight Brothers:

My editor is dying to know why you called this track “Reggie Miller.”

Well, it works on a surface level because when I think of Reggie Miller, the Indiana Pacers guard, I think of the early ’90s but really it’s a marijuana reference. Reggie Miller is slang for regular weed or schwag–low-grade brick marijuana with seeds. Back in the days, that was what you smoked if you wanted to get high unless you lived in Cali or Vermont or somewhere where people were up on high grade. Back in the day you could have a sack of Reggie Miller, be making cassette tapes, passing some E&J, that would be a fun day. But now, you couldn’t get a negro to smoke a Philly full of bush if you paid him, iPod playlists killed the mixtape, nobody sells nicks and, yeah, XO is just perks.

*Literally, too (so close)