A biracial Jewish- Canadian child actor turned rapper.


LOS ANGELES - For most of his teenage years the young hip-hop star Drake, tall, broad and handsome, was still known as Aubrey Graham (Drake is his middle name) and played Jimmy Brooks on the popular Canadian teenage drama “Degrassi: The Next Generation.”

In the last 18 months, though, he’s become the most important and innovative new figure in hip-hop, and an unlikely one at that. Biracial Jewish- Canadian former child actors don’t have a track record of success in the American rap industry.

“Thank Me Later,” just released, cements Drake’s place among hiphop’s elite. It’s a moody, entrancing and emotionally articulate album that shows off Drake’s depth as a rapper, a singer and a songwriter, without sacrificing accessibility. That he does all those things well marks him as an adept student of the last 15 years: there’s Jay-Z’s attention to detail, Kanye West’s gift for melody, Lil Wayne’s street-wise pop savvy.

“Thank Me Later” has its share of bluster, but is more notable for its regret, its ache.

In fact, dodging vulnerability has been a fact of Drake’s life since he was a child. His parents split when he was 3. An only child, he lived with his mother, who soon began battling rheumatoid arthritis, a condition that eventually prevented her from working, forcing Drake to become responsible at a young age. His father, Dennis, who is black, was an intermittent presence - sometimes struggling with drugs, sometimes in jail.

“One thing I wasn’t was sheltered from the pains of adulthood,” Drake said. When something upset him as a teenager, he often told himself: “That’s just the right now. I can change that. I can change anything. The hand that was dealt doesn’t exist to me.’ ”

From an early age he’d been interested in performing, whether rewriting the lyrics to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or spending time as a child model. He and his mother were then living in a well-to-do, Jewish neighborhood in Toronto, where he was often the only black student at his school. His mother is white and Jewish, and Drake had a bar mitzvah.

At school he struggled academically and socially. “Character-building moments, but not great memories,” he recalled. In eighth grade he got an agent and was soon sent off to audition for “Degrassi: The Next Generation,” an updated version of the popular 1980s Canadian drama.

He auditioned after school, on the same day, he said, that he first smoked pot from a water pipe. Nevertheless he landed the role of the wealthy, wellliked basketball star Jimmy Brooks .

“Part of his journey is trying to figure where he does fit in in the world, having a white Jewish mom and a black, often absentee father,” said Linda Schuyler, a creator of the show. “It’s almost a comfort factor with Jimmy Brooks. That was the antithesis of his life at the time. It was probably reassuring and a bit escapist for him to play that role.”

In 2006 Drake, then an acolyte of hip-hop’s thoughtful bohemian wing, released his first mixtape, “Room for Improvement.”

The New Orleans rap star Lil Wayne heard Drake’s music in the summer of 2008 and invited him out on the road. “I sat in the same place on the bus for a week,” Drake recalled. “I was scared.”

Drake quickly became a key part of Wayne’s touring madhouse, and whenever there was downtime he worked on songs.

The outcome was “So Far Gone,” his third mixtape and one of last year’s best-received hip-hop recordings. It’s one of the most ambivalent, melancholy documents of rap success ever released, which is odd, because it was recorded long before Drake’s turn in the limelight.

The bawdy “Best I Ever Had” became his breakthrough solo hit. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, practically unheard of for a song that originated on a mixtape. Eventually it would earn Drake a pair of 2010 Grammy nominations, a first for a rapper with no album out.

“A lot of ‘So Far Gone’ was predictions,” he said. “I was rapping about things I’m only going through now.”

Now Drake wonders if real intimacy is out of reach. “Did I sacrifice something?” he asked. “Have I not realized what it is yet because I’m enjoying this too much?”


By JON CARAMANICA