I drove around that Valentine’s Day Eve, breathing in the skyline, wondering at the way he had given voice to the anxiousness, hopes, fears, dreams, and insecurity roiling inside me. You want angst? “Say What’s Real,” a four-minute rumination on loneliness and broken promises over a beat from 808s and Heartbreaks, starts with the kind of phrase you’d find written in any emo kid’s journal: “Why do I feel so alone?”Īnd I felt that shit. In one moment, he’s pleading that “I just wanna be successful ” in another, he’s talking about disappointing his mother while struggling with money (“…she wonder where my mind is, accounts in the minus”). He’s a one-man boardroom, assessing the musical and cultural landscape and then building his gleaming high-rise smack in the middle of the hot neighborhood, towering over everyone else’s developments. Drake, just six months my junior, was speaking directly to a young twentysomething in the jaws of a once-in-a-lifetime capital-R recession who was balancing hopes and dreams with the prospect of being an unending failure.

But most importantly, it first showcased the Canadian child actor’s most persistent gift: His ability to tap into and articulate a cultural shift, to make it resonate so loudly that it drowns out everything else. The album spawned a tour, music videos, Billboard-charting singles. Someone who could go directly from Datpiff to a household name.ĭrake was that messiah, and So Far Gone was that gospel. Someone to prove that the future was online. Stars like Wiz Khalifa and B.o.B had already emerged from the new ecosystem, dropping projects online and circumventing the gatekeepers entirely - but we were all still waiting for that one crossover artist for vindication. I was a year into my career as a music journalist, watching the internet wreaking absolute chaos on the industry.

Just 22 years, ringing in Valentine’s Day 2009 in my car, driving around Chicago, listening to So Far Gone. At 22 years old, swarming Mediafire and Rapidshare links like they were electronics stores on Black Friday morning, looking for the one that still had what I was after. I was 22 when Drake’s defining, star-making mixtape So Far Gonehit the internet like a meteor.

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