When Drake takes advantage of your girlfriend, how can you help but hate him?
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It was a standard Saturday morning in January 2013. Just seven months removed from college, I was hungover, recapping the night before at my friend’s kitchen table in San Francisco. I had a long-distance girlfriend in L.A., so in her absence, I naturally had little choice but to get very drunk. Slumped over in a chair, I was scrolling through Instagram and saw she’d just posted a desktop screenshot from the night before. It took me a second to understand what was happening in said screenshot, but it looked like her and a few friends were on Chatroulette. And who should they be chatting with roulette style? One young Aubrey Drake Graham.
Why would three 23-year-old girls go on Chatroulette in 2013? I don’t know. Why would Drake do the same thing? That’s easier to answer: because he’s a schmuck.
He was pretty douchey but it’s Drake so you know.
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As is the way in long-distance relationships, such a context-deprived social media nugget made me aggressively self-conscious. She didn’t text me about this the night before and I hadn’t talked to her yet that day. Honestly, I already didn’t like Drake much but I decided to try to be cool instead of a dick and send her a text to demonstrate my excitement over this apparent one-in-a-however-many-people-still-used-Chatroulette scenario. Which is really like two or three forms of thinly-veiled jealousy.
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It’s been a while, but here is more or less the conversation that unfolded:
Me: Shit babe you saw Drake on chatroulette? What? How? That’s fucking crazy
Girlfriend: Morning babe! I know!! It was so random
Me: So like what happened? Also chatroulette? People still use that?
GF: Haha yeah we were just bored pregaming and somehow started talking about it so we thought we’d see if it still worked
Me: That’s so crazy. What did he say?
GF: He was pretty douchey but it’s Drake so you know
Me: Yeah was he super sleazy? How can you be a famous rapper and also bored on a Friday?
GF: Totally. Asked us to flash him
Me: No way. Did you?
[20 min pause in which my palms condensate at an alarming rate]
GF: I mean, yeah, super quick. It was just too crazy
At this point, too-cool-don’t-care guy was eaten alive by irrational-rage-guy, and after talking it over with my friend, a.k.a. making sure he was on my side — “no, for sure, that’s total bullshit,” he confirmed — I called her up and tried to calmly tell her I wasn’t really okay with her going on Chatroulette and subsequently flashing a famous Canadian rapper that, prior to his music career, was known primarily as the guy in a wheelchair on Degrassi. A lower-tier Canadian rapper, say, Kardinal Offishal? Sure. Maybe. But not Drizzy. The dude just pissed me off.
When you map a situation like one of the parties flashing Drake during a brief Chatroulette session onto the equation, reality slips even further away from your sweaty fingertips.
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In retrospect, her counter argument was pretty sound: “It was Drake!” At the time though, I mostly ignored this fact and tried to spew bullshit about how I wouldn’t have flashed my dick at Rihanna if I bumped into her in an online video chat forum. This line of thinking was narrow-minded in at least forty concrete ways. Eventually it just boiled down to a simpler, altogether stronger grievance: “what the fuck is wrong with you?”
In a relationship, arguments can spin out of control pretty quickly, such that neither side is really angry about what originally bothered them in the first place. When you map a situation like one of the parties flashing Drake during a brief Chatroulette session onto the equation, reality slips even further away from your sweaty fingertips. We were in a relatively healthy arrangement though, so after cooling off the rest of the day, we (I) came around to realize how absurd the whole thing was, laughed it off, and continued to live our lives.
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Except for the part where I didn’t.
Of all the things I’ve avoided in my life out of pure spite, the two-plus years in between The Chatroulette Fiasco Of ’13 and Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late are a clear-cut winner. My girlfriend and I broke up 4–5 months after the kerfuffle (because…let’s go with timing), but we remained on great terms and continue that to this day. My relationship with Drake though? That went from bad to worse. I refused to play him whenever an aux cord was under my control, turned down my rage a good 70% whenever he came on at a bar/club/party, and was plagued by a dirty feeling if he so much as came up in conversation — long after my real-life relationship had ended.
I have to admit I like his work, but I’ll never stop thinking he’s a creep and a loser.
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Mostly, I think it just stung that of all people, Drake is the one that got to someone I was intimate with like that. Even though he’s at the top of his game and could in theory command much more than a second of pixelated breasts through an aged, gimmicky website from countless women, it bothered the shit out of me. Sure, the lingering anger realistically stemmed from my own insecurities as opposed to anything my ex or Drake did, but I wanted someone to blame. Drake was the easiest target.
Musically speaking, it wasn’t until If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late dropped that I realized I couldn’t ignore the guy anymore. Months after its release, I have to admit I like his work, but I’ll never stop thinking he’s a creep and a loser. Now that I’ve come to terms with the whole thing (have I?) and can simultaneously listen to him and hate on him though, it’s really a have your cake and eat it too situation. Sort of. But I will say that regardless, it feels pretty good knowing on a personal level this “Energy” line is bullshit:
“I got girls in real life tryna fuck up my day / fuck goin’ online that ain’t part of my day”
This post originally appeared on Medium/Human Parts. Reprinted with permission.
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Photo: Getty Images