It really really really isn’t great to be Drake, my friends. Let me explain. Aubrey Drake Graham is a rich and famous rap star. He is a young man whose talents have given the world multiple albums of brilliant music and given him, in turn, droves of fans, massive accolades and, we can estimate confidently, several big fat truckloads of Canadian dollars. Drake doesn’t just make the usual type of rap music about how amazing he is, how foolhardy it will be for haters to cross him, and now much richer, more fortunate, manly and dangerous he is. He does that on occasion but he is better known for his love songs. Drake sings about romance and love and heartbreak. These are themes we would find hard to swallow from a rich and famous pop star. After all, if a mere ordinary simpleton like Julian, (an ordinary simpleton I went to school with) could have any girl he liked, without any merit save for his capacity to play a few guitar chords and perhaps his access to a sizeable allowance from his rich mom, who is Drake to complain about not getting girls? Rappers lie about many things, but getting a date is not one of them. Even the least likely, Jay-Z, who served us half a dozen CDs of casual misogyny and chauvinism managed to get Beyoncé to give him enough of the time of day for him to convince her that he could change and be a better man if she gave him a chance, bae, just one chance, and Beyoncé, who we all know is no starry-eyed bimbo, acquiesced to the point of having three babies with this trash. If Jay-Z of “We don’t love these h**es” fame, can marry Beyoncé, then who is Drake? Who is Drake to tell us he has girl problems? And yet he does. He very publicly, very sadly and pathetically does. You see, Drake has been in love with Rihanna for years. He told us so in a speech at the VMAs in 2016, not that anyone asked, when he was supposed to just say “this award goes to Rihanna,” and leave the stage. Instead he gushed on about being in love with her since he was old enough to drink rapper liquor. He wrote a number of songs about her. And they were good songs. Many of the world’s f-bois even stole lines from those songs to confuse your sisters and it worked. Every time Rihanna has broken up with a boyfriend, Drake has been there, with hankies and wine and an expectant look in his eyes above the leery grin in his beard. And yet every time, she still swerves the man. This week, Kevin Durant, the star NBA player, who is currently in isolation recovering from Covid-19, was in a celebrity Instagram live chat. Don’t worry about his health. He has a strong athletic constitution and a lot of money so he is recovering well. During the chat, not only were his regular, normal fans, peasants like you and I, tossing comments onto the window at him but, also in the fray were his fellow celebrity fans. Including Riri herself. She made a lame Coronavirus joke ngo, “Should I be wearing a mask while I am here chatting with you?” (I am paraphrasing, of course, to compensate for the spellings and non-family friendly language used). He replied, “See your life. You weren’t you in Europe just last month?” Riri, fluttering her eyelashes (that’s how I picture it) and wearing a sexy smirk on those perfect lips of hers (as you can see, Drake is not the only one in love with her) typed back. “Wapi. I’ve been here in the US for months.” The conversation was going on as smooth as any flirtatious IG chat would, then Drake himself jumped in. “We have to dead the ‘treyfive’ Corona jokes,” he said, thirty five being Durant’s sports number. And what was Rihanna’s response to Drake? Nothing. No word, no emojis, no seen, blue ticks, nothing. She just kept on chatting with Durant while Drake sat there staring at the phone suddenly feeling lonelier in his isolation with nothing but the sound of crickets echoing around him. Poor guy. And he even already tested negative for the Rona but still can’t get a reply.
