At the end of the first night of Wireless Festival on Friday, after Drake had been hoisted out over the tens of thousands of fans who had taken over the bottom half of London’s Finsbury Park while Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” blared over the speakers and fireworks brightened the night sky, he asked the audience, and also festival organizers, for a little indulgence. Curfew was firm, but art has its own clock.
Boom, there was Lauryn Hill, suddenly onstage performing the feisty Fugees classic “Ready or Not.” Drake had dropped down into the pit below the stage, and was looking up at Hill with joyful awe. He popped back onstage while Hill performed her biting kiss-off “Ex-Factor,” which formed the base for one of his breeziest songs, “Nice for What,” which he performed alongside her until the festival cut their mics off.
This year’s Wireless Festival was a three-day affair given over to Drake and his many spheres of influence, and in a weekend full of collaborations and guest appearances spotlighting various corners of his very broad reach, this was perhaps the most telling. During her career, Hill has been a ferocious rapper, a gifted singer, a bridge between hip-hop and pop from around the globe. She is the musician who, apart from Kanye West (now Ye), provided perhaps the clearest antecedent for Drake and the kind of star he wished to be: eclectic, hot-button, versatile, transformative.
Apart from a few dates on an Australian tour earlier this year that got cut short, this was Drake’s first high-profile live outing in over a year. That public retreat came in the wake of last year’s grim and accusation-filled battle with Kendrick Lamar — in which Lamar’s Not Like Us,” which suggested Drake had a preference for too-young women, became a pop anthem, a Grammy winner and a Super Bowl halftime showstopper, as well as the focus of a lawsuit by Drake against Universal Music Group, the parent company both rappers share.
The question of what’s next for Drake has, for most of the last 15 years, also pointed to what’s next for hip-hop, and often what’s next for global pop. And that’s part of what’s made the past year so disorienting — the sidelining of Drake has left an explicit hole in that conversation.
But the post-conflagration part of his battle with Lamar has been something of an anticlimax. The struggles with Lamar often distilled to one central perceived tension — Lamar had purchase over a purer version of hip-hop, while Drake had less claim to it. Side-picking was hip-hop’s primary sport last year. But if Lamar’s victories were arguments for a traditionalist view of hip-hop ethics, Drake’s performances here, and the ones he orchestrated around him, offered a more catholic approach, and also one focused on the future — an implicit rebuke to that mode of thought.
Drake headlined each night of Wireless with a differently themed set list: a day focused on R&B, a day of rap, a day of club and party music. And his sets were peppered with guests — he kept referring to the calls he’d made, the subtext being that plenty of people still happily answer those calls.
And so these appearances were about alliances, sure — with American rappers like 21 Savage and Sexyy Red, or British stars J Hus, Skepta, Headie One, Dave and Central Cee. (Drake even anointed a young British comer, Fakemink, who delivered an out-of-breath version of “LV Sandals.”) “Nobody can outrap London rappers,” Drake said. The Nigerian star Rema, during the festival’s third night, gave one of its most electrifying performances, ranging wide from the tender flirtation “Calm Down” to the warlike “Ozeba.”
Opening night tilted toward the sensuous with Mario, sounding hale on “Let Me Love You,” and Bobby Valentino, slightly less so on “Slow Down.” Giveon did an austere three-song set wearing silk and cradling a glass of wine. Bryson Tiller, perhaps the first R&B singer to respond to Drake’s innovations in real time in the mid-2010s, excelled on “Exchange.” There was also an intoxicating but slightly overlong run of songs with Drake sharing the stage with his longtime collaborator PartyNextDoor, with whom he makes some of his most astrally placid music.
Sometimes these performances felt designed for an audience of one: Drake. Few stars of his level are so vividly fans of other musicians, and certainly not in hip-hop. His joy while watching Skepta rap, or helping Sexyy Red out of her shoes so she could twerk more freely, was infectious — even when others were performing, Drake was working harder.
Around half of Drake’s time onstage was devoted to his guests. When he himself performed, he leaned on high-energy strings of like-minded tracks — on night two, it was the pugnacity of “Headlines,” “Energy,” “Know Yourself” and “Nonstop”; on opening night, it was a tender run of “Teenage Fever,” “Virginia Beach,” “Feel No Ways” and “Passionfruit,” which he sang just a touch behind the beat, then smeared the back half into a quiet-storm vamp. He didn’t overindex on his biggest songs: often just a hint of a familiar warm-bleed synth sent the crowd into a roar.
His opening songs each night weren’t hits, per se — they were Easter eggs for loyalists. On the first night it was “Marvin’s Room,” his 2011 magnum opus of toxic solipsism. On night two, it was “IDGAF,” a rage-rap experiment with Yeat, who joined him onstage in a matching Chrome Hearts poncho. And on the final night, it was an unheard new song with the British star Central Cee, manna for the local crowd.
Each time, it was the equivalent of walking in a room and immediately making yourself comfortable on the couch — no pretext, no pretense.
Drake is also not immune to schmaltz — at the end of each night, he took to the same crane-hoisted platform to thank the crowd during “I Will Always Love You” (a gesture he borrowed from his mentor Lil Wayne). And on the second night, just before that, the pop singer Vanessa Carlton emerged at a piano and pounded out a sweet rendition of her yearning 2002 hit “A Thousand Miles” while Drake cheesed madly. (The daily pre-Drake performer lineups displayed deep reverence for each form: sets from the nimble R&B singers Summer Walker and Sailorr, Southern rap surrealism from Sahbabii, the inventive British rappers Lancey Foux and Fimiguerrero, the South African amapiano star Uncle Waffles, the Nigerian neo-traditionalists Burna Boy and Odumodublvck.)
Though joy was his dominant mode throughout the weekend, Drake was also keen to project strength. On the first night, he was wearing a bull-riding vest (or something like it) that read “Stay Cocky.” Drake also brought his own press, sending a private jet to ferry a boatload of popular livestreamers and YouTubers — Adin Ross, BenDaDonnn, DDG, Los Pollos, Kyle Forgeard of Nelk, and more — who provided nonstop content online throughout the weekend. It was a sophisticated media strategy — their collective reach exponentially outstripped the real-time crowd, and allowed Drake to do for high-profile streamers, still a media curio to many, what he once did for promising little-known regional rappers: boost their profile with his simple stamp of approval.
Here, Lamar and other enemies were mostly an afterthought, or at the most, a subtext. At one point on night two, the crowd erupted into a vulgar chant directed at Lamar, spurred on by Ross. Drake heard it and puffed his chest a little: “Y’all thought y’all could knock the boy off for real?”
Earlier this month, Drake livestreamed on YouTube for an hour, driving an ice delivery truck through the streets of Toronto to premiere his new single, the sinister “What Did I Miss?,” which just made its debut at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s almost foaming at the mouth with disdain, a strong entry in Drake’s long catalog of I-wish-you-would disdain.
He performed it on the festival’s second night, but only then. However, he played “Nokia,” his optimistic up-tempo party hit from earlier this year, each of the three nights. “Nokia” was released in February on “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” Drake’s collaborative album with PartyNextDoor. As a whole, that release felt like a tentative place holder, a style experiment with loose energy and low stakes. But “Nokia” was different, an electro-rap hybrid that recalled “Hotline Bling,” one of his biggest hits.
It felt of a piece with the story about himself he was telling especially on the festival’s third night, which showed off his gift for big-tent pop — “Controlla,” “Find Your Love,” “Work” — that absorbs elements from around the globe, from vital music scenes often overlooked in the mainstream. Drake’s reach takes in British drill, Jamaican dancehall, Nigerian Afrobeats, South African amapiano, Southern rap, and so much more — in short, a trans-Atlantic cosmopolitanism unconcerned with any one local rule book. The rest of the world is so, so big.
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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