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The young cats at my Factotum-like night gig all hate Drake. Now, while I can honestly say that I knew this would occur, it happened a lot sooner than I expected. I mean, they all hate 50 Cent too, but 50 at least took seven years to build up this level of loathing, Drake’s been around since when? Last April?

It’s to the point now that whenever a Drake song plays on the radio (and we play the radio quite loud at the gig), they all moan and beg for a station change.

“That guy’s nice,” I say, defending Drake.

“Yeah, but c’mon…” the youngest of them gripes, “A 24-hour champagne diet???”

What do I say to that? I mean, I try to be realistic and suggest that maybe they’re all just hating but they insist it’s more than that. See, I think it boils down to this: almost everybody feels that they’re too smart for the job that is currently underpaying them and almost nobody feels just ‘happy to be working’. You couple this with the fact that there are people that are living the lives that most of us can only dream of and instead of being ostentatiously thankful, these people often come across as boastful. Well, of course you could scale this phenomena down to the smallest case scenario in which you say, well you here at your job; you’re living somebody’s dream. There are people that would be overwhelmingly ‘happy to be working’ and there are people that would not at all feel too smart for the work or underpaid in the least. But the young cats ain’t trying to hear that. They’re also not trying to hear Drake. Patti Labelle, the Black Eyed Peas, The Bee Gees, Johnny Cash, anybody but Drake!

Also I think part of it is the fact that never before has the Hip Hop of our time been so incongruous with the times. The party-hearty Hip Hop of the early ‘80s matched perfectly with its era. The socio-political Hip Hop of the late ‘80s fit its time like a glove. As did the rugged new awareness of early and mid ‘90s Hip Hop and the psychotic paranoia of the early 2000s Hip Hop fit their days and ages.

With President Obama in office for over a year now, you’d think that all the new Hip Hop would sound something like Jay Electronica’s ‘Exhibit C’, with hidden messages of menacing Black empowerment throughout. I don’t think it’s too late for cats like Drake to get that memo either. I mean he is, after all, nice.

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