Drake has Conquered the Queers
Actually Nevermind is implicitly for the Girls, Gays, and Theys
Drake has successfully captured the attention of an extremely lucrative demographic without explicitly addressing them, and no one is talking about it.
It may have been inadvertent, or it may have been calculated brainstorming from his team. Whatever the case, Drake has made Jersey Club the backbone of a number of tracks on his newest album, Actually, Nevermind, including the charting single, “Massive,” spending the past three weeks since being released on Billboard’s Hot 100. Jersey Club has strong ties to the soundscapes of ballroom competitions — effectively engaging the LGBTQ+ community and peripheral allies. This is not only a great move towards diversifying his audience, but also expanding on the stickiness of consumership. Dance music in general is the auditory theme of this new album, which was dedicated to House music enthusiast Virgil Abloh, the genre itself the brainchild of queer black men like Frankie Knuckles.
When Actually Nevermind came out, TikTok blew up with memes of surprise, joking that he made this album for the girls and the gays, referring to Jersey Club as “vogue music.”
