Canadian Gothic & Sub-Styles

[Xelebes]

I don't really know anything about Drake either. Drake, from what I have heard of his music, perpetuates the cringe-y Canadian stereotypes in the same vein as David Wilcox's blues.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Xelebes

I don't really know anything about Drake either. Drake, from what I have heard of his music, perpetuates the cringe-y Canadian stereotypes in the same vein as David Wilcox's blues.

David Wilcox! I haven't heard that name in 20 years! He was absolutely HUGE with the student crowd when I went to university in Ontario! Some people I knew were almost groupies.

[hipster duck]

Thanks for that article Rousseau. It was one of the better ones I've read all year.

One thing I thought about while reading that article is that the transformative turn that's happening in hip hop, in general (and by that I mean in the US), is sort of Southern Ontario Gothic, but entirely coincidental.

In both cases, we see a growing worldliness leading to a timid and very introspective "rebellion" against a prevailing establishment that has a firm order despite its very parochial roots. In the case of Southern Ontario Gothic, it's against rural Protestantism. In the case of hip hop, it's against the [forcibly] closed circle of life as a black American male, and all the ways those insecurities manifest themselves in life and in lyrics.

A protagonist in a Southern Ontario Gothic novel will run away from a place like Listowel to a place like Paris (France) and find that they don't belong. A hip hopper like Kanye or Kendrick Lamar will leave the panoptic hell of the ghetto for the purgatory of being a successful black entertainer in white America. And just like Southern Ontario Gothic, some of the best new rap isn't a superficial or banal analysis of what it's like to be caught between the two worlds, nor does it have the Sesame Street prescriptions for making the world you left behind a better place that used to infect a lot of rap songs. I think that the author of the Slate piece does a good job of citing examples of some of the complexity underlying Drake's lyrics on the matter.

Anyway, to sum this up, I think that Drake is evolving along hip hop lines, rather than along Southern Ontario Gothic lines, but the comparison is interesting.