How D-Sisive challenges Drake’s success story
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D-Sisive is frank when responding to listeners’ questions. On his website last week, speaking to the subject of potential collaborations, he threw out a passing reference to Canada’s biggest rap export.
“Drake never responds to my tweets.”
Both rappers dropped new albums last week (Drake with Take Care and D-Sisive with Run With The Creeps). They’re both fiercely talented at what they do, but they couldn’t be more different. Drake is a platinum-selling, international superstar. D-Sisive is a hard-on-his-luck working man who’s given most of his albums away for free to anyone who’ll listen. Drake pushes the line of rap ever-closer to R&B, while D-Sisive feels more informed by a punk ethos—at least because he writes tributes to GG Allin and collaborates with Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham. Drake rolls with Lil Wayne; D-Sisive works with ex-Mike Bullard foil Orin Isaacs.
One thing they do have in common, though, is that they both hail from Toronto. Musicians often paint pictures of their life using their hometowns as source material, and Drake and D-Sisive are no exception. It’s a huge part of both of their identities. They each paint a distinctive vision of Toronto that weaves its way through their music, colouring their worldview—and putting that worldview on a pedestal for all to see.
Drake knows he’s Toronto’s biggest export. “My city love me like Mac Dre in the Bay,” he says in Take Care’s album opener, “Over My Dead Body.” “And he’s right: He’s made it. He busted his ass, and now he doesn’t really know what to do about it. An affluent child star from Forest Hill, he largely avoided the prerequisite struggle that has historically informed hip-hop lyricism. He’s happy just to take care.
He knows he’s got respect back home. In “Underground Kings,” he proclaims what Torontonians are ready to do: “Do me like the women from my town would.” Of course, Drake is respectful of those who helped him rise to fame, as evidenced by “Look What You’ve Done.” But in his vague references on this album, he otherwise paints Toronto like a town where everyone loves him, at the centre of the universe he created—a universe that feels like the club district on a night where he’s perpetually fucked things up.
D-Sisive paints his world with a much different brush. A product of Northcliffe Boulevard at Eglinton and Dufferin, D-Sisive speaks of a harsher world than that of Drake. He’s less concerned about a night on Richmond Street because he’s worried about paying his phone bills. His words, coloured by lifelong depression and often by his father’s death, paint a gritty picture.
There are fewer references to his hometown on Run With The Creeps, released last week, than previous work like Jonestown 2, but his words for the Big Smoke’s streets have always been bleak. On album closer “One Last Dance,” D-Sisive calls himself “a lightbulb shattered on a Toronto street, no voice to speak.” He’s declared war on Rob Ford. He’s reminisced about growing up in a tiny apartment, running wild in Fairbank Park. His Toronto isn’t a sprawling clubland, it’s a vast city with opportunities to find yourself, if you wade through shit creek first. He also exhibits a penchant for wearing beaky bird masks that resemble a droopier version of the spies from those Spy vs. Spy comics, which does little to endear him to rap’s mainstream. In fact, these things seem to situate D-Sisive in direct opposition to the hip-hop culture of Drake and his young, monied collaborators.
If Drake and D-Sisive offer wildly different perspectives on Toronto, it’s because the city has given them such vastly different opportunities. Both are valid, because Toronto is a city of varied experience. You can grow up in Scarborough and never leave your bungalow-lined street, and you can move from the Prairies to the waterfront condo farm and run ragged in the club district five nights a week. Some are luckier than others—but, as Drake is constantly trying to tell us, an endless stream of money, booze, and sex isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be.
The truth, though, as at odds with hip-hop’s rags-to-riches fantasies as it may be, is that Toronto isn’t always what you make it. Sometimes you’re stuck with what you’ve got, no matter how hard you bust your ass. There’s no name-dropping in “Ceiling Fan,” but D-Sisive, frank as ever, makes no bones about being compared Drake: “He’s depressed about being rich. / Well, I’m depressed about being not, / But he’s so swag when he says it, and I’m so sad when you write me off.”
