Drake
Photo by Joe Budden.

In the middle of the night, Drake released a yearning slow-jam called “Girls Love Beyoncé.” It plods forward, and Drake sings unsteadily over a codeine-soaked sample of the Destiny’s Child classic “Say My Name.” He laments what fame has done to his love life and ability to connect with women, so the subject matter doesn’t veer far away from Drake’s usual meditations on his fame-induced trust issues. On his recent single, “no new niggas / nigga, we don’t feel that” feels like a maxim of exclusivity, but here “no new friends” becomes a refrain to Drake’s involuntary loneliness: his celebrity is an asterisk on every interpersonal relationship.

When we see pictures of Drake looking existentially unhappy as he throws $50,000 at a strip club, rapping about how he’s fallen in love with another stripper, it’s hard to relate. Very rarely are rappers publicly dissatisfied with their own life, because popular hip-hop mixes drug-induced confidence and consumerism, and rappers flaunt the lifestyle that money and fame allow for them. Rap is indulgent, escapist music about impossible lifestyles, and I accordingly listen to rap to feel temporarily invincible.

Songs like Rick Ross’s “King of Diamonds” are bombastic, aural expressions of unstoppability that exist through sheer force of will. He spends nearly half of the song screaming “Rozay,” which doubles as a stage name and favorite variety of champagne. It’s a testament to excess, and as menacing horns blare over war-march snares, it feels like wealth. By the end of the song, you believe that Ross “took your bitch to get lemon pepper in a new Lotus,” and you’ve never been more excited and confused. The song is about pure extravagance, but a casual date with “your girlfriend” at a chain chicken restaurant is lumped in with the rest of this lifestyle.

It’s a tremendously out-of-character line for Ross, who is currently embroiled in controversy for rapping about date rape. Ross is no stranger to sexual frustration either. He freely admits in “Us” that money is the only reason he gets any attention from women (“I pay for pussy, oh man, she’s gotta be bad / She fuck with me, that bitch know I’m ‘bout to buy them bags”), and even if he doesn’t pay them, any casual sex he has is attributable to his celebrity. One of the perks of fame is the sex, but it’s not because of personality or even looks, it’s fame. It’s not like Drake won’t have sex with ‘your girlfriend.’ He can and will, but he wishes they could conceivably fall in love too.

The genre’s stunted emotional range likely has something to do with its origins in battling. Every rapper is actively competing with others, and unsheathing vulnerabilities is only fodder for the competition. One independent rapper Young Neil explains this pretty well, rapping “can’t rap ‘bout fucking these hoes / when I got a girl at home, like Hov,” as if to say there isn’t much else he can rap about. Rap isn’t traditionally about therapeutically pulling your skeletons out of closets; it’s about standing in front of your closet with a pistol, preemptively threatening anyone who walks by. These musicians are supposed to be emotionless, they’re the ones fucking “your girlfriend,” not because they think she’s charming and love the way she laughs, but because you do and they don’t. Rappers are traditionally men, not just in terms of gender, but gender stereotypes. Even female rappers bizarrely assume male positions; Nicki Minaj raps about pimping in “Coochie Shop,” and V-Nasty tells listeners to “suck on [her] cock.”

So when hip-hop reflects on its obsession with casual sex, it nearly always champions it. Even “for the ladies” songs—typically phoned-in songs with sung choruses directed at women and encouraged by record executives to expand potential audiences—only direct this same narrative at ‘your girlfriend.” In “Why You Wanna,” T.I. complains: “in a relationship and faithful to a nigga so wack / hey why you wanna go and do that?” and explains that “your girlfriend” should have sex with him because he’s tremendously wealthy.

ASAP Rocky’s “Fuckin’ Problems” meditates on sex with some nuance, though the song is still a swaggering ode to fucking. 2 Chainz, who thankfully doesn’t bless the song with a verse, shows up on the chorus to chant, “I love bad bitches, that’s my fuckin’ problem / and, yeah, I like to fuck, I got a fuckin’ problem.” The song revolves around this pun and is about how much ASAP Rocky, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and 2 Chainz like to have sex, and it works because they really like to have sex—even Drake. He hasn’t forgotten about falling in love with unattainable women (“I love bad bitches, that’s my fucking problem”) and waffles between lust and love (“just drop down and get your eagle on / or we could stare up at the stars and put the Beatles on”), half-heartedly becoming what a rapper is supposed to be (“I don’t really say this often, but this long-dick nigga ain’t for the long talking.”)

The song is novel in that it explicitly says fucking is a problem: the sampled Aaliyah vocal is both sexual moan and dejected sigh, and the same duality is reflected lyrically. “Fuckin’ Problems” implies what Drake fully articulates in “Girls Love Beyoncé,” and both help to explain hip-hop’s somewhat misogynistic treatment of women. Drake’s problem, and the genre’s too, is that any given woman can’t mean anything more than sex, and it’s beginning to hurt.