People from Toronto aren’t given to proclaiming their affection for the city. They may cheer for its sports teams. They may enjoy its food, parks and museums. They may appreciate its safety. But they don’t tend to shout about it, much less sing about it. For most of us, Toronto is a place to live but not to love.
One Toronto man is fixing to change all that. It doesn’t hurt that he is an international recording star with a hot new video. Since the moment he burst onto the rap music scene, Aubrey Drake Graham has made it his mission, nearly his obsession, to talk up his hometown. Almost single-handedly, Drake is making it respectable to love Toronto.
His videos show off the city’s soaring skyline. His lyrics are peppered with Toronto references. He wears his heart not just on his sleeve but on his skin. He had a tattoo of the CN Tower inked on his arm and the numbers 416, for the city’s area code, on his flank.
He is an enthusiastic front man for basketball’s Raptors. Last month came news that he opened a fancy Toronto restaurant with local chef Susur Lee.
He has even popularized a new nickname for Toronto: The 6, sometimes rendered The Six or The 6ix. It may refer to the 6 in 416 or 647, or it may not. Either way, it’s spreading.
Lots of Torontonians have gone on to fame and fortune in the world beyond. None have made such a point of the debt they owe to the city. “You and the 6 raised me right,” he says in a track addressed to his mother on a recent release.
He told Rolling Stone that Toronto is “my favourite place in the world” (even if the winters are hell). He told another interviewer, “When I think of myself, I think of Toronto. My music would never sound the way it does if it weren’t for Toronto.”
It’s hard to imagine what our city fathers would have thought of the idea that, one day, a profanity-spewing popular singer would be the chief global ambassador of Toronto the Good, but in 2015, he fits the role rather well.
His mixed background – Jewish mother, black father – reflects the vibrant multiculturalism of his city.
He seems as at home in the suburban Rob Ford country where he spent part of his youth as he is in clubland downtown. He manages to leaven the hard-partying rapper persona with a dash of vulnerability. He can scowl and blow clouds of smoke with the best, but then that big, goofy grin spreads over his face. He seems slick but, well, nice, a trick that, at its best, his hometown manages, too.
Even his faults are very Toronto. Like his city, which recently overtook Chicago to become North America’s fourth largest city, he is the new kid on the block, still a bit of an outsider in the hip-hop world. His detractors call him too “soft” or even, as he complains in a lyric, “not black enough.” He tends to get in minor feuds with other rappers.
In common with Toronto, he seems to have a bit of a chip on his shoulder, an inferiority complex that sometimes comes across in thin-skinned crankiness or a thirst to be the centre of attention.
Just the same, Toronto is lucky to have such a cheerleader, foul mouth and all. His love for the city that raised him is infectious. Drake sees in Toronto something that Toronto sometimes doesn’t see in itself. The hidebound provincial city is becoming a humming global metropolis.
All of a sudden, and against all odds and preconceptions, Toronto is a place not just to live but to love. If one of the coolest guys on the planet can shout it from the rooftops, why shouldn’t we?