Hotline Bling

Sometimes I worry about Drake.

I don’t mean like, whether or not he’s eating enough leafy greens. (Judging by how fit he’s looked on Instagram, it seems like he is.)

It’s a few things really.

I worry about how much credit Drake gets for being, essentially, a kind and hot dad-of-a-guy, sensitive and well meaning, just looking out for women. According to his lyrics, though, he’s not. He’s often kind of creepy. He’s been in the business of telling women how they should and are allowed to be long before “Hotline Bling,” but the viral technicolor jam best illuminates his patent patronizing, patriarchal tone.

“Hotline Bling,” in short:

Drake and a woman used to be involved. The woman would call Drake, often, for late night love. As you do. But then things changed. Whatever was between them ended.

The woman: You and I are no longer involved and we don’t even live in the same place anymore. I’ve moved on and—

Drake: I’ve noticed you wear fewer clothes now. This must be a direct result of how you and I no longer living in the same city. Also, who are your new friends? Why don’t I know them? You used to be a good girl! You used to stay at home!!!

The woman: Drake, that’s kind of sexist. And how do you even know what I wear these days? I thought I blocked you??

Drake: Why don’t you ever call me anymore?

The woman: Drake we aren’t even dating or anything I don’t—

Drake: **elevator music outro**

His anti-feminist politics are my first worry, for sure. Then comes, related, and a little more complicated, the worry I feel about the white feminist perception of Drake, of the inevitable white think pieces about black misogyny.

And worse, how everything under the white gaze these days feels like consumption to me. The other day I sat out of a talk I wanted to go to because I just couldn’t take a room full of queer white people consuming a queer person of color. It would have just been listening, but it would have felt like a buffet, a crowd picking their teeth with familiar bones.

It feels almost the same when the white people behind me in the dining hall are sitting around a laptop laughing at the “Hotline Bling” video (not even parody vines or anything, but the original damn video, this late in the game). A girl says, “Gosh, look at all those butts. Usually, at least, there’s a reason for all the butts.” There are no women, apparently, attached to said butts. Afterwards, I imagine the people at the table sucking their teeth clean.

I’m worried about all of that tiring personal political stuff, and I’m tired of being tired. A white guy walked up to my group of friends the other day and started joking about “oppression” and my body physically started aching. Maybe it’s just flu season. Either way, I left. So I don’t want to talk about that stuff. I want to talk about love.

In high school, Drake’s “Nothing Was the Same” became a girl for me, as did the entire city of Atlanta, as albums and cities tend to do when you are a teenager and in love and good at ascribing big meanings to big things. I don’t really listen to that album anymore, because of this, but I can remember sitting in my cheesy-ass baby blue Honda civic in front of a bad sushi restaurant in my hometown with my debate partner and best friend, listening to “Nothing Was the Same” start to finish. Even if I can’t listen to too many of those songs because of the girl, that memory and that album became part of the love I had and have for my best friend. We were the only two black girls in our friend group, always too loud and finding solace in bad music. We skipped class one day and drove somewhere unimportant, shouting the lyrics to a series of Big Sean songs, lyrics we knew were offensive to us specifically but clumsily reclaimed as ours. And that was love.

When I was around 12, we drove to Virginia to watch my genius mom defend her dissertation at Hampton University. For some reason, the entire drive was occupied by some odd CD of black wedding songs, (at a wedding this summer, my dad and I realized we didn’t even know how to guess what music they play at white weddings, the cannon of black wedding music our only reference point), and the only song my older brother and I wanted to listen to on the soundtrack was “When We Get Married,” the Larry Graham version, which is important because of those falsettos at the end. We were sick of being in the car together, my mom was a mess, my parents were only tenuously getting along . But whenever Larry Graham hit those high notes, my brother and I did too, and the whole car would crack up, and it wouldn’t matter if we were lost, or angry at each other, or generally broken. My mom cried during her defense, and so did a few others in the room. I kind of figured all dissertation defenses looked like that, all black and all proud, with desperate tears, but apparently they don’t. But that day, that was love.

All that my parents taught me about romance they taught me by giving me their music. The Supremes, Gladys Knight. My mom has always been a sucker for Luther Vandross. I have to remind myself that it would be misguided to worry about where Drake fits into that. I do really love Drake. Often, on the way to a particularly doing-too-much class, I listen to a playlist comprised almost entirely of Drake and become impenetrable. The lyrics are questionable, sure. They always are. But the songs make me feel huge, and sometimes that’s love.

The other day, some folks from Renegade got together to have a Tiny Dorm Concert. Rarely on this campus have I ever felt that warm. For my people, music is healing. Whether it’s “Trap Queen” or gospel. My parents have been trying to tell me this forever. For me, a good music video has rebuilt a shaky friendship. A single deep track could signal to the kids at a barbecue to go inside, leave the adults to the booze and sunset and citronella candles. An album has forged a bond. And right now, when the constant mental onslaught of being black and/or queer is too much for too many people, when there are videos floating around that could single-handedly end me, when for me and for many the stress registers physically, when checking my phone and getting out of bed and going to class is an Olympic act, as far as reprieves go, I am taking what I can get. And sometimes that’s love.

Madison E. Johnson ’18 lives in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.