'Thugs don't dance'
This story was adapted from Episode 6 of Louder Than A Riot, Season 2. To hear more about iLoveMakonnen, Drake and how hip-hop enforces norms of masculinity, stream the full episode or subscribe to the Louder Than A Riot podcast.
Their encounter was brief but tense.
Two years after striking a musical partnership that launched with a Billboard charting hit and ended with an unceremonious split, Drake and iLoveMakonnen came face-to-face one night for the last time. The impromptu meeting, at Rihanna's afterparty for the 2016 MTV VMAs, would serve as their final goodbye.
"I ain't seen Drake in a minute," Makonnen recalls years later. "So I was like, "Drake, what's up!"
His enthusiasm was not reciprocated. "He looked at me like, 'Look, next time I see you, I'm gonna f*** you up for talking s***.' "
If you've spent any amount of time since then searching online or off for iLoveMakonnen — the rapper who seemingly vamped from the industry after breaking big in 2014 with his Drake-assisted remix "Tuesday" — you may already understand how hypermasculinity contributed to curbing the rising star's trajectory nearly a decade ago.
In Looking For Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, a book published just one year before Makonnen and Drake's fateful one-off, cultural critic and academic Mark Anthony Neal outlines the five tropes that defined hip-hop masculinity at the time: playas, pimps, hustlas, thugs and n*****. None of which left much room for artists who existed in between those rigid confines. Through sonic innovations that helped set rap's SoundCloud era in motion, Drake and Makonnen each charted subversive, emo paths at a time when the genre's mainstream players were still marked by hardness and artifice. They made a hit together, and threatened to disrupt the status quo, before one of them perceived the other to be the potential threat.
While women in rap have been the primary focus of 's second season, misogynoir also manifests in the stories of male artists, especially those whose performance of masculinity counters the accepted cultural norms — that is, the kind of Black male presentation that Neal's book, we track the story of iLoveMakonnen's rise within the industry, and the particular impediments he faced along the way. Makonnen challenged hip-hop's standards in a way Drake didn't. His eventual coming out as gay in early 2017 helps us understand something about the fragility of masculinity in hip-hop.
