Can Drake Save the Bar Mitzvah?
The Jewish Week
Blog: Well Versed
2012-04-12
Eric Herschthal
When Drake’s new video, “HYFR,” dropped [was released] over the weekend—in which the Jewish, biracial hip-hop superstar raps at a bar mitzvah—I was thrilled. Initially.
For years, pop culture references to the Jewish rite of passage have been stuck in the same mode of self-mockery. Self-criticism is great, and in retrospect I partly appreciate the brutal truth that films like the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man” show to us Jews—that this once incredibly powerful, meaningful rite had become totally cauterized, stripped of any real substance. The bar mitzvah has become just another excuse to get the family together—half of which you may not even like—and torture a poor 13-year-old with a foreign tongue he’s probably less comfortable with than trigonometry.
But the Coen brothers didn’t invent that trope; it’s been around for years. What felt so refreshing about Drake’s video, and still sort of does, is how it isn’t self-mocking at all. Here’s a rapper so at ease in the self-conscious, status-driven world of pop star culture, that he can brandish his Jewish identity with little self-pity. He brings his Jewishness to a world—the hip-hop world, and the millions who love it, myself included—that’s mainly known Jews as a stereotype. The Jew, in hip-hop, is either the boss behind the scenes or, on the rare occasion (as with the Beastie Boys), the nerdy white kids who are lovingly embraced—but still, let’s be clear, as nerdy white kids.
Drake’s changed all that. In large part that’s because his Jewishness is not the first fact about him. Many see him mainly as a black rapper, if a light-skinned one. And even when he broke onto the scene a few years ago and, when asked, would talk about his upbringing by a white Jewish mother in Canada—who sent him to a Jewish day school, and had him bar-mitzvahed—you didn’t get the sense he was trying to hide it. But I’m actually less interested in what Drake’s openness about Judaism says about the changing world of hip-hop—and my sense is that, in many ways, it’s far more evolved in terms of black-Jewish relations than much of the country—than what it might say about Jews’ perceptions of themselves…
…As much as I want to stick up for Drake, I think Kuehne is right. The song and the video still have many of the hallmarks of what’s problematic with hip-hop—mostly, the objectification of women. Plus, there’s a ton of profanity. “But she was no angel, and we never waited,” Drake raps at one point. “I took her for sushi, she wanted to f*** / So we took it to go, told them don’t even plate it.”
The song’s title, “HYFR,” stands for “Hell Yeah F***ing Right.”…
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