"Sometimes I feel like I'm so focused on training my body and getting my mind right to create this album that sex isn't one of my main priorities. "You know the way fighters don't fuck before the fight?" he says. Right now, Drake says, he feels like a bor in training before the main event. "You notice they don't criticize the music itself, though," says Drake about his detractors. And-here's the crazy part-Drake is the favorite. It's wildly competitive they each want to be number one. At the moment, Drake is also, unquestionably, the most radio-friendly-his voice has been a constant presence on the airwaves in recent years, on his own hits and those he's gifted to other artists. Which leaves Drake, who's staked out an interior space all his own, willing to rap and sing (he gets a lot of attention for doing both) about love and desire, loneliness and isolation. But for all his prominence, Jay-Z hasn't written a lot of crossover hits. Then there's Jay-Z, who morphs a certain street hustler's cool and indifference into CEO extravagance. But on his new album, Yeezus, he's gone dark and aggressive and chosen not to release an official radio single. There's Kanye, the trailblazer, who's churned out some of the genre's most radio-ready hits this past decade. If unintentional, his timing is uncanny, because both Kanye West and Jay-Z have new albums coming out just before his, which means this summer will say a lot about the current state of rap. Album sales, critical acclaim, street cred. This time-three albums in, at the age of 26-the stakes seem highest of all, because Drake wants the crown. When the front gate opens to allow passage, a woman's voice coos, "Access granted." Drake's boys call it Disneyland. Drake bought the place for $7.7 million from a restaurant-chain mogul who threw in all the furniture, too. There's an air-conditioned doghouse and a wine cellar.
On the property are stables, a mechanical bull, and a movie theater.
Hung everywhere, the indoor-outdoor flat-screen TVs shine like mirrors. Someone leaps from the top of the waterfall into the pool while another holds on to the cliff and does pull-ups. The pool is like a scene out of Waterworld, with a bar inside a grotto, waterfalls, and a slide that drops thirty feet through the rock. A number swan about as if in a museum or a music video, firing their iPhone cameras, while others take dramatic, slow-motion strolls by the pool, as if this all will soon be theirs.ĭrake's home is its own fantasia, a single-level ranch that sprawls in various wings over 7,500 square feet, from the game room to the gym to Drake's master bedroom with Jacuzzi.
Some are super chatty, some aloof some are full-bodied, some as wispy as a tamarack. Suddenly, bikinied women seem to materialize from thin air, as if competing in a rap beauty pageant.
It's been a stretch of hard work, and everyone's eager to blow it up a little. Another brightly scrubbed California day, and Drake's crew-the guys from Toronto who live with him here-are downright joyous. It begins at three in the afternoon-the pool party-about an hour after Drake wakes in his manse in the San Fernando Valley.