Running on Vulnerability Since Degrassi

Before he was a rapper, Drake was a teenager on a Canadian TV drama. He played Jimmy Brooks—the basketball player—on Degrassi: The Next Generation from age fifteen, stuck around for 138 episodes across eight years, then walked away from acting entirely to make music. The origin story matters because it explains everything the critics never forgave him for: the emotional availability, the willingness to be hurt on record, the Toronto kid who kept saying the quiet parts out loud.

He came up the right way—mixtapes first. Room for Improvement in 2006. Even the title was a tell. Humility in hip-hop is suspicious by nature, but Drake made it work by being genuinely good rather than falsely modest. Thank Me Later followed. Then Take Care, Nothing Was the Same, Views. Each album bigger, each one giving the detractors more to argue about. Too soft. Too commercial. Too willing to cry.

Scorpion just dropped—a double album where he raps about the past and the present with the kind of openness that still makes people uncomfortable in a genre where vulnerability gets coded as weakness. That transparency is exactly what makes him worth listening to. The critics who hate him for it are proving his point.