REVIEW: At his show at The Apollo Theater, Drake managed to convey a quiet understanding of his music's appeal.
’s bedroom. Or some version of it, at least. The musician born Aubrey Graham is seated on the edge of a neatly made bed, and a dim tulip-shaped lamp stands in the corner of the stage, designed as a replica of the teenage bedroom where he wrote his first songs. His outfit of baggy jeans and a yellow-and-blue basketball jersey complete the tableau. Number eleven, Degrassi High.
Before he appears on stage, we hear a recording of Drake’s mother, Sandi Graham, by now a central character in the Drizzy cinematic universe. “Aubrey, try to keep it down tonight when you’re working,” she says. A supportive parent trying to get a good night’s sleep. Drake turns the introduction’s quintessential Drake-ism inward.
The show would be about gratitude. And the meticulous recreations at moments have the feeling of naked sincerity. His own version of, except as Drake tells us on “6PM in New York,” absent on the night’s setlist, he’d just like, “to feel a couple things twice.” As he describes them, the tracks he would play are what got the 36-year-old rapper out of that bedroom.
It was Drake’s first time performing at the Apollo, and the venue’s legacy as a proving ground for raw talent brought the rapper’s scrappy origin story to life. It was indeed on medium capacity stages like this one that Drake put in an athlete’s effort to win audiences’ attention and keep it. Starting with“Over My Dead Body,” which punctuates his introduction.
After the boom-bap sampling “Wu-Tang Forever,” he dives headfirst into the emotional corners of his catalog. Following a rendition of “Trust Issues,” in which Drake delivered a vocal performance worthy of cheers on Showtime at the Apollo, he tells the crowd to essentially buckle up. “Nah, we going there tonight promise you.” Then came “Marvin’s Room,” possibly the rapper’s opus. The venue’s comfortably packed crowd quickly realized that he wasn’t kidding.
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