To Drake, Sydney feels like a second home. I’ve heard him say the same about Houston and Atlanta, and I believed it then, and so I believe it again on Wednesday night, when he tells it to all 18,000 Sydney representatives at his Qudos Arena show. We were instructed by Drake to keep this next bit quiet, but the Wednesday night crowd was secretly better than the Tuesday night crowd.
And so it goes.
Drake has a legitimate claim at being the world’s biggest pop star at the moment. Like all stars these days, he is a multi-hyphenate: rapper-singer-actor-businessman-Canadian. His arena show is a spectacle of lights and sound, of his hundreds of hit singles crashing into each other (not hyperbole, check the charts) with guest verses spliced out, no more than 90 seconds played of any song; like a late ‘80s megamix, it’s as if the DJ gets so excited by the prospect of kicking into the next Drake hit — after all there are so many hits, and not enough time to hit them all — that he skips through them while Drake tears off verses and choruses seemingly at random. It’s excellent stuff.
Drake’s DJ operates solely unseen, from off the stage somewhere with mics and monitors and cue screens. This only matters in that it illustrates that — at a Drake show — there is only Drake, alone on the stage.
Just Drake, and you.
There wasn’t even a support act, just a DJ and a hype man playing Drake songs, with the odd Kanye or A$AP song shoved in to at least give a semblance of attempted balance. Which is all important, because it implies to get another rapper to open for Drake is to be giving the evening an unworthy introduction. Who are you gonna get to open for Drake? 1200 Techniques? Scribe?
Like every world-class performer, Drake is the central point of his own show.
This is a Drake show, and at a Drake show, you watch Drake command the stage; the audience literally surround him on a platform stage – theatre-in-the-round. And Drake makes amazing use of this stage, prowling around as beams of lights hit him, as his many hits tumble into each other, as he somehow never turns his back on any segment of the audience, despite this being a spacial and physical impossibility. Does Drake have the ability to bend space? To twist physics? To popularise a term like YOLO and then somehow transcend it? He seems to.
The staging at Qudos was incredible, odd bubble-like structures rising and falling from the roof, dancing into patterns around and above him. It’s hard to explain, so here’s a grainy iPhone pic, which should clear things up nicely.
Those were balls on strings, not light patterns. It was impressive; much like how Kermit riding a bike in The Great Muppet Caper seems a lot more magical because you know there was no magic involved whatsoever.
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Between songs, Drake celebrates life with 18,000 citizens of his second home. To Drake, however, he is celebrating just with you. The rest is just noise, just buzz. To hammer this home, he even singled out one girl to sing to at one point, asking her name, wooing and cooing at her. It was a Courtney Cox/Bruce Springsteen moment.
Almost as if to counter the intense frenzy of the early hit-crammed portion of his set, he spent a solid 15-minute portion towards the end of the show where he instructed the house guy to turn up the lights on one segment of the audience, and then quickly scanning the crowd, he assured an immense number of people, one by one, that he could see them.
“I see you in the Blue Jays jersey, I see you waving the Canada flag, I see you near the aisle, dancing, I see you in the green top, I see you with the Toronto Raptors jersey. I see you with the pigtails, I see those three girls in the matching tops, I see you up the back.”
And so he scanned, shuffling for side to side, row to row, letting everyone know that he could see them. For 15 minutes.
Drake sees all his fans, and they see him. He writes personal songs, he spills secrets, he names names. He doesn’t often paint himself in the best light. Drake fans know Drake. They have heard him tell hundreds of stories about himself, over a decade. Drake fans see Drake.
But those are old stories. Now, for the first time, Drake sees you. You knew he’d get you, he’d understand you, that he was like you. But now, he sees you, you in the white shirt, standing near the aisle. That’s you he sees.
You see, a Drake show isn’t about Drake at all – it’s about you.
Remember though – you’ve heard the songs, so you know the story. The real story.
Drake sees you, sure, but that doesn’t mean he’ll call you back.
