Today, Drake turns 31 years-old. Happy birthday! It's a great age for one to look back on their previous decade and wonder if they've made the best use of it. Despite a multi-platinum recording career that put Toronto's rap scene on the map and making it so that every new rapper for a time was murmuring scorn over low-pass-filtered beats, Aubrey Graham's crowning cultural footprint is likely his Twitter account. He's vacated it in recent years because he's busy and because the site is objectively terrible, but what remains there should be appreciated.Drake's TL tells two stories: that of a Boy becoming a (6) Man, but also of the journey from innocence to self-awareness.
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Truly, he was indistinguishable from any number of struggle rappers just trying to get heard. Sweet, pre- So Far Gone Drizzy. Who knew that Peter Bjorn & John remixes would take you to such heights?
On his first birthday after he blew up, Drake was already soliciting favours from then-bigger artists in his usual awkward manner. His ascent was swift from then onwards. Behold:
The above is Drake's greatest tweet. Everything else here is also great but this is corniness as high art. Let us continue. 2012 was a banner year for the Boy's Twitter presence, as evidenced by the nuggets below:
A classic, yes, but still not as good as the "seven days" tweet.
The prior tweet is the last "random," non-promotional tweet Drake has sent. Do you feel aged in any way? Does seeing an artist's social media growth like this allow you to view time as a finite expanse? Was Drake ever good at Twitter? Well, his weird greeting card aphorisms mean he probably was the one who unintentionally allowed fakedeep parody accounts like that Chance the Rapper one to flourish. If so, it's a legacy as big as the others he's left behind. I'll leave him to define himself in his own words:
Phil graduated in Aubreynomics years ago. He's on Twitter.