The photo dump is, by now, a well-honed genre of Instagram post. Caption it something like “July”, or even better, a specific date range, as if your life is so interesting it needs a full-time archivist. Add a few pictures of family and friends; a few selfies, ideally with an artfully cluttered backdrop; and some other visual flotsam, like zoomed-in photos of funny shop signs, or a five-second video of a tree.
Drake , a man with a private jet and a Toronto mansion so opulent he calls it “the embassy”, thinks on a bigger scale. Yesterday, he unveiled “100GIGSFORYOURHEADTOP” : a barebones website containing roughly 100GB of files for download, organised in folders with terse, all-caps names like “2_SOTA” and “THEO_EDITS”. The first three files are new songs – “It’s Up”, with Young Thug and 21 Savage ; “Blue Green Red”; and “Housekeeping Knows”, with up-and-coming Atlanta rapper Latto – and they’re all pretty good, though maybe not huge hits.
The rest? Hundreds of video clips and dozens of photos spanning Drake’s entire career. The shorter his hair and the bigger his beard gets is the best way to date them. This is, essentially, a XXXL Insta dump, with the same vibe of faux-arty casualness: many of the clips are abstract, and seconds-long; one folder, “2_SOTA/MIAMI_STORM”, consists entirely of moody shots of a Miami storm at dusk.
We see Drake listening to songs in the studio; listening to songs stretched out on a sofa ; listening to songs via his phone speaker held up to his ear, eyes closed, his head bobbing to the beat. But just as you might agonise over which photo of your cluttered bedside table to include in your own photo dump, 100GIGS is far from spontaneous. It will have been the result of hours of discussion between Drake and his consiglieres in an air-conditioned bunker deep in the embassy.
It probably isn’t too much of a reach to assume this performative display of openness is an oblique response to his bruising rap beef with Kendrick Lamar in the spring. Kendrick made all sorts of wild, viral accusations about Drake’s private life – here, Drake seems to say across hours of video, is the truth. If this is some kind of 3D chess move, it’s a weird and often very funny one.
For starters, it’s no wonder Drake wears glasses these days, because the lighting in his studios is terrible. Many of the videos are simply him and his producers sitting in a murky glow – a dim blue, green or red – pensively listening to songs. Too much of that guarantees eye strain.
You could also play a Geoguessr -style game of spot-the-backdrop: is Drake at home, in a studio or a luxury hotel ? It depends on what piece of modernist sculpture is hanging over his shoulder. Livening up all the Drake-in-the-office content are appearances from his family and famous friends. Drake plays table tennis with Stephen Curry in front of an unlit fireplace.
Drake, wearing a Wimbledon -branded Ralph Lauren polo, takes part in a penalty shootout with Ashley Cole. Drake, draped in Slick Rick’s enormous chains, poses for a photo with French Montana. Backstage at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Drake’s dad strolls into shot in a pale pink hat, Nehru jacket and several chains from Drake's clothing line October’s Very Own.
Drake then says a prayer, asking God to bless his band and his “lovely beautiful dancers”. Drake leads his son Adonis on to an empty illuminated stage, saying: “Look at that; that’s where daddy works.” It seems some OVO lackey has been recording the capo’s every move for years, in anticipation, probably, of a big documentary down the line.
Some of the conversations they capture are revealing and charming: Drake and his mum Sandra sharing a light-up shisha pipe in the studio as he plays her “Too Good” from Views . The song is about his old flame Serena Williams – “I know that she’ll hear it loud and clear”, he says. Sandra then points out that Williams is now seeing someone else, thank you very much.
A lot of 100GIGS is, of course, very boring: dudes looking at their phones and computer screens in bland rooms. Noah “40” Shebib, Drake’s main producer, holds up a half-empty bowl of Nespresso pods in a studio kitchen to illustrate their caffeine consumption. We get Drake moaning about his schedule – “everything’s a puzzle” – and how everything takes longer than you think.
Occasionally, there are glimpses of Drizzy’s paths not taken. A moodboard for the decal of his plane includes a design with lightning running along the fuselage, and the all-caps inscription “CHANCES ARE, SHE’S ON BOARD” on the undercarriage. There are alternate album artworks, including, for Certified Lover Boy , one that thankfully didn’t go beyond a watercolour sketch: a bunch of naked women in a music studio, some playing instruments, and others just draped over the furniture.
One woman is licking a saxophone. Drake contemplates the scene from a control booth at the back. And how about a Future verse on “Hotline Bling”? In footage from a studio session for the song, Drake gets stuck in to shisha while listening back to it; he wiggles his head to the groove and opines, accurately, that it could pop off at Wireless .
Then he says he briefly considered asking Future for a feature – surely one of the great sliding doors moments of modern hip-hop. A handful of revelations aside, 100GIGS confirms Drake’s essential truth: he’s both very dorky and very serious, and he’s also very serious about nailing that dorky part of his persona. There’s footage from the “Hotline Bling” video shoot, which resulted in a masterful and very memeable sequence of sublimely goofy dance moves.
The production team cheers when Drake gets into them; at one point, he bows theatrically to his audience. But when the video is being edited, he’s deadly serious, instructing: “You gotta captivate people on some, ‘Oh wow, this guy is on a fucking wave right now.’” Drake has got as big as he has partly because he’s an everyman – when he’s on a fucking wave, he's not afraid to admit it.
And he’s still as obsessed as the rest of us about giving off an artfully controlled impression of his life online..
