For a rapper as well-known as Drake, there remains an essential element of mystery about him. For one so open, there’s a distance, and he prefers it that way. But then there’s something beneath the exterior that reveals itself with urgency in conversation: Drake’s raw ambition.
In the video for “Started from the Bottom,” a song from the new album he posted on his blog over Super Bowl weekend, Drake is shown—among the requisite amount of rapper posturing, thick smoke, and bikinied ass-shaking—dancing with gold bars. The song has become almost more anthemic as the months have passed, not just because of its contagious riff but also because the lyrics capture something both aspirational and relatable while shining a light on the storyteller, Drake, who, sheared of his old curls, shines with a harder edge now. (Boys tell stories ’bout the man, runs one lyric. Say I never struggled, wasn’t hungry, yeah, I doubt it, nigga.)
“By no means will I take a water break,” he tells me. “I feel guilty on vacation. I feel guilty right now, talking to you, guilty that I’m not working.”
He muses aloud about money. Yes, he wants it—for what it can buy, for what it signifies. He vowed he’d bank $25 million by the time he was 25—and he did—and now he’s wondering what it would take to run his life, with a wad of perpetual pocket money, at the level he wants. With the private jets and cribs, the vacations and hotel suites for the crew. He’s talking about Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire and owner of the Chelsea Football Club, whose yacht Drake believed cost $550 million.
“Do you know that even if I had $250 million in the bank, I couldn’t buy half of that?” he says. (Turns out the yacht actually cost $1.5 billion.) “Rappers aren’t the really rich ones. We all have nice houses with studios and cars, but you need a piece of someone’s business to be super wealthy.”