In
the beginning, Drake’s “Hotline Bling” was a pure
child of the Internet. Released in July on his label’s SoundCloud page following a premiere on Apple Music’s OVO Sound Radio, it felt like a casual throwaway, a breezy compatriot to “Charged Up,” his anti-Meek Mill song, which landed at the same time.
child of the Internet. Released in July on his label’s SoundCloud page following a premiere on Apple Music’s OVO Sound Radio, it felt like a casual throwaway, a breezy compatriot to “Charged Up,” his anti-Meek Mill song, which landed at the same time.
And
yet “Hotline Bling,” a song about romantic disappointment and
shortcomings, which moves at a slow shuffle, has become a surprise radio
hit and is currently at No. 2 in the country.
This
week, though, the Internet decided it wanted “Hotline Bling” back. Late
Monday night, Drake released its video, mostly made up of long shots of
him dancing in front of a plain background that’s constantly changing
colors: mustard, lavender, baby blue, peach, chartreuse. The clip, directed by Director X,
is both warm and slick, giving this song — part of the lo-fi catharsis
segment of Drake’s catalog — the grand-scale sensation that thoughtfully
minimalist approaches can trigger.
The “Hotline Bling” video is also the moment when Drake fully becomes a meme.
No
celebrity understands the mechanisms of Internet obsession better than
Drake. Online, fandom isn’t merely an act of receiving — it’s one of
interaction, recontextualization, disputed ownership and cheek. For the
celebrity, it’s about letting go of unilateral top-down narratives and
letting the hive take control. For fans, it’s about applying
personalization to the object of adoration.
The
“Hotline Bling” video is built exactly for that task. It’s important at
its full length, but even more so in the screenshots and
few-seconds-long GIFs that it’s designed to be broken down into. It’s
less a video than an open source code that easily allows Drake’s image
and gestures to be rewritten, drawn over, repurposed.
In
part, that has to do with the unclutteredness of the video, which
mostly surrounds Drake with blank space. There’s also the nature of the
dancing itself, which is also more or less blank: a series of slight
shifts of weight, quick hand gestures, head bobbles and side-to-side
steps. They’re small moves that he repeats — in essence, he’s making a
GIF of himself, anticipating what will inevitably happen to him online.
There’s
also nothing contemporary about the moves — no dabbing, no whip, no
hitting the quan. Instead, they’re concise, universal, more about
implication than full expression. They’re also relatable and a little
bit goofy, another mechanism of approachability.
Because
of that, they can be mapped onto almost anything, which is exactly what
the Internet did. Within hours — minutes, really — Twitter and Vine and
Instagram and Tumblr were filled with short clips pulled from the video
set to other songs: Elvis Crespo’s merengue conflagration “Suavemente,”
the “Seinfeld” theme, “Danza Kuduro,” various Vince Guaraldi ditties
from “Peanuts,” and, most crucially, “Obsesion” by the bachata boy band
Aventura. (If there is a style parent to Drake’s dance micro-moves, it
is probably bachata.) Often these clips were accompanied by the hashtag
#DrakeAlwaysOnBeat, though, strictly speaking, he wasn’t.
The
most ambitious memes, however, did more than marry the video to new
audio; they tweaked the video. One took a segment where Drake was
swatting his arm and put a tennis racket in his hand,
making him thwack away balls fired at him. Another replaced the music
with the zippy horns of the later-seasons theme song from “The Cosby
Show,” overlaying the video with a credits scroll for “The Aubrey Show.”
(Drake’s given name is Aubrey Drake Graham.) Most technically
impressive was the clip that superimposed lightsabers into the hands of Drake and his dance partner-choreographer, Tanisha Scott.
Drake,
of course, knew all of this would happen. “We were looking at
playbacks, and he was like, ‘This is totally going to be a meme,’ ” Ms. Scott told Complex.
Transparency
has always been Drake’s bailiwick, but this approach to content
creation takes it past a place of emotional vulnerability and into an
advanced space where an artist induces people to create their own
narratives: The star is at the center, but not in control. Making a meme
of a celebrity can be a way to sort through complex feelings of fandom.
It’s an act of devotion, and also undermining. Drake, more than anyone,
understands that this will happen whether or not he wants, so why
should everyone else have all the fun? He wants to play, too.
This
moment of full meme absorption comes just as Drake and the art world
have been dancing around — and sometimes with — each other. Last year,
he took a writer for Rolling Stone
to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see an exhibition by James
Turrell, whose influence is strong on the “Hotline Bling” video. This
summer, he partnered with Sotheby’s to help promote a gallery show of
contemporary black art.
Art
has been on Drake’s mind since at least 2011, when, on the song “Dreams
Money Can Buy,” he rapped, “I got car money, fresh start money/I want
Saudi money, I want art money.” Like many rappers faced with growing
wealth and outmoded options for what to do with it, he understands art
as a different layer of class transcendence — something beyond expensive
clothes, cars, houses. (In this, he follows rappers like Jay Z,
collector of Basquiat and imitator of Marina Abramovic; Kanye West, who
has collaborated with Takashi Murakami, Vanessa Beecroft, George Condo;
and Swizz Beatz, a well-regarded collector and sometime artist.)
Drake
is something of a meme artist himself, or at minimum a meme
archivist-historian. That was clear in August at his OVO Fest in
Toronto, where he definitively ended his squabble with Meek Mill by
displaying a slide show of savage memes pulled from the Internet behind
him as he performed “Charged Up” and his other Meek Mill attack, “Back
to Back.”
He also recently appeared on the cover of W magazine’s art issue,
where part of the feature involved five artists — Kaws, Jim Joe, Mark
Flood, Henry Taylor, Katherine Bernhardt — offering artistic
interpretations of Drake.
This
is a clever solution to an old problem: how to differentiate one
celebrity magazine cover from all the others. But it’s also consistent
with the appropriative license many artists online have been taking with
Drake’s image for years now. Thanks to Tumblr and Instagram and a
generation raised on the cut-and-paste values of the Internet, Drake art
has been ubiquitous online for some time. Mostly, it lives at the
intersection of high art and fan art — high fan art?
A
year ago, the Brooklyn artists Grace Miceli and Shana Sadeghi-Ray
curated a collection of Drake-themed projects on the website Art Baby Gallery.
Over the summer, Ms. Miceli — who makes a T-shirt representing Drake
lyrics in the style of Jenny Holzer’s “Inflammatory Essays” — curated a
group show at Alt Space
that included a handful of Drake-related pieces. And on Saturday —
Drake’s 29th birthday, as it happens — Living Gallery in Brooklyn will host
a Drake-themed party and art show featuring the work of five artists, including Daren Chambers, whose work as True Minimalist is popular on Instagram.
a Drake-themed party and art show featuring the work of five artists, including Daren Chambers, whose work as True Minimalist is popular on Instagram.
“Hotline
Bling” isn’t the first time Drake has become clip art for social media.
Memorably, in 2013, a photo taken of him on the set of DJ Khaled’s “No
New Friends” video, which caught him mid-pose wearing a throwback Damani Dada athletic outfit, became a web sensation. One company even began manufacturing polo shirts with the picture embroidered on the chest.
Of
course, what did Drake do when he found out about those shirts? He
ordered some. What did he do with the video of him dancing to Aventura?
He posted it to his own Instagram account. And True Minimalist’s
sketches? They’re there, too, along with all sorts of Drake fan art. You
don’t meme Drake; Drake memes Drake.
That
tail-swallowing has accelerated to the point where the original content
almost begins to blur. And yet not, because all of these videos — the
Vines, the Instagram shorts, the YouTube clips — they all spanned the
song’s reach. Drake got “Hotline Bling” to No. 2; maybe the Internet can
get it to No 1.
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