“The most interesting male phenomenon in music over the past year has been Drake, the former Degrassi star who has since become the spiritual successor to those early Kanye West records, mining the emotional depths of pop stardom with skill. But dude has been accused of making rap “soft,” a bizarre term that seems to imply a “right” way and a “wrong” way of doing rap; if you’re not going HAM, ur not doin it right. Or, to put it another way, talking about how you’re feeling with the type of honesty Drake does on Take Care is just something the rap community isn’t willing to endorse whole-heartedly.

But reconcile that with news today that dude may have convinced some girl to have sex with one of his buddies while Drake himself watched (ALLEGEDLY LOLOL). Soft on the mic, sure, but that allegation if true makes Drake seem equally as sexist as any of his “harder” peers. There was an article a few years ago about Rivers Cuomo’s narrator on Pinkerton, and how Rivers seeming like an honest, nice, not-unattractive dude made girls romanticize the rather unpleasant character Rivers portrayed on that record. This news now paints Drake in the same light; he’s always been honest about getting with random women and kind of feeling bad about it, but no one has considered in honesty the way his narrators treat women because he comes off as a nice guy (compared to, say, Tyler who comes off as an asshole and has every lyric examined microscopically). All of these forms of sexism are equally as damaging, but because the messenger has a nice smile, we as a public are sometimes too willing to ignore that fact.” - Chris Bosman (@racecarbrown)