Drake

Bio

Aubrey Drake Graham is Drake. He is, by streaming numbers, the most-listened-to rap artist in the history of streaming. He has been at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 more times than any rapper in history. He has, since around 2009, been the most commercially dominant figure in mainstream rap. He has also, in 2024, decisively lost the biggest rap beef of the streaming era.

He was born Aubrey Drake Graham on October 24, 1986, in Toronto. His father Dennis Graham is from Memphis. His mother Sandi Graham is Canadian Jewish. Drake grew up middle-class. He attended Forest Hill Collegiate Institute. He spent six years (2001 to 2007) acting on the Canadian teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation, playing a basketball player named Jimmy Brooks who gets shot and ends up in a wheelchair. He was using the Degrassi paychecks to fund his early mixtape work.

So Far Gone, released as a free mixtape in February 2009, was the breakout. The mixtape sold itself. By 2009 Lil Wayne had heard it and signed Drake to Young Money, the Cash Money imprint. Thank Me Later (2010), Take Care (2011), and Nothing Was the Same (2013) made him the biggest rapper in the world. He invented a kind of singing-rapping hybrid mode (with the consistent production help of Noah "40" Shebib and Boi-1da) that ended up defining mainstream rap radio for the next decade.

The hit list is too long to cover. "Best I Ever Had." "Forever" (with Kanye, Wayne, Eminem). "Marvins Room." "Started from the Bottom." "Hotline Bling." "One Dance." "In My Feelings." "God's Plan." "Nice for What." Drake had a streak of about a decade where he could put out essentially anything and have it lead the charts. If you have listened to any pop radio in the last fifteen years, you have heard Drake.

Then 2024. The Pusha T "Story of Adidon" diss had landed in 2018 (the one that revealed Drake's son Adonis and rocked Drake's image, though Drake never responded meaningfully). In 2024, Kendrick targeted Drake on "Like That," Drake responded with "Push Ups," and the two of them exchanged ten increasingly serious diss tracks over the next month. The summary is that Drake lost, decisively, and the public consensus that emerged is that Drake's persona had been carrying his discography for years. "Not Like Us" became a hit. Drake's commercial momentum stalled.

He has not stopped working. For All the Dogs (2023). $ome $exy $ongs 4 U (2024), the collaboration with PartyNextDoor. The catalog continues. The cultural position is recalibrated. He is no longer the unchallenged most-popular rapper alive. He is, instead, a very-popular rapper with a complicated public reputation. The full long-arc verdict on Drake is still being written. He is, in 2026, thirty-nine years old, still releasing music, still very rich.