Why Drake Can’t Pull Off Being the ‘Good Guy’

Now let us make prayer hands: Drake is looking for the meaning of life. The rapper who christened himself “6 God,” coined our era’s WWJD with YOLO, and landed a smash chorus about “a higher power,” openly wonders about the status of his soul on his latest blockbuster, Scorpion. Astrology, “God’s Plan,” and mystical “stones and crystals” get mentioned across the sneakily engrossing double album. But what does he really believe?

Religion typically figures into Drake’s public persona only as ingredients of his identity mishmash: He was born to a Catholic father, raised in his mother’s Judaism, and is conversant in the Islam of his close friends (2018 : “Drake says ‘inshallah’ in new song … and Muslim girls are ready to marry him”). Yet spirituality acts as a subtleoverstuffed albums. Of course,a lot of rappers compare themselves to Jesus. But Drake moralizes more than most as he enacts one of the essential dramas of this secular age: an individual straining, and not quite succeeding, to cobble together a personal ethical system.