Though it touches predictably on Jay Z and Kanye West, what the article doesn’t find the time to cover (or, perhaps, criminally doesn’t find the need to recognise) is the influence of Carly Rae Jepsen, or how – despite its comparative invisibility to something like What A Time To Be Alive – for similar reasons, EMOTION is the best album released in 2015 so far. Because “You don’t meme Drake Drake memes Drake.”) (Essentially: Drake, self-aware and sociologically savvy enough to know that anything he does will be instantly transformed into a meme, crafted the ‘Hotline Bling’ video for this exact purpose. The piece – Jon Caramanica’s ‘ Drake: Rapper, Actor, Meme’ – is, by all accounts, a pretty decent read: it isn’t exactly comprehensive, and there’s not a huge number of ideas in there that haven’t at least run through the head of anyone with a passing interest in social, art, and music theory – but Caramanica lucidly highlights the way in which contemporary means of the dissemination of information not only have an effect on the way we consume and interact with culture here on the receiving end, but also at the root on its production.
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Reacting – along with, variously, more or less the entire Internet to different degrees and with heavily divergent attitudes – to the release last week of the video for Drake’s ‘Hotline Bling’, the New York Times published an article detailing the artist’s wholesale embracing of twenty-first century meme culture and its implications.