It’s been five years since Drake’s last North American tour and in that time he’s dropped one mixtape, one collaborative album, and two solos (with a third imminent). But on the first stop of his new show, It’s All a Blur, Drake got fans in attendance at Chicago’s United Center (and those watching via clips instantly shared online) hype by kicking things off with an oldie.
The 36-year-old superstar opened with “Look What You’ve Done,” a Take Care classic he probably hasn’t performed in years (if not a decade), and even had an actor portraying a younger version of himself onstage. The tour poster, which depicts a handful of versions of Drake from different eras in his career, promised a contemplative set list that reckoned with the entirety of his discography. That’s exactly what he delivered on night one, running through hits and favorites from his earlier albums, going back to his 2009 Timbaland collab “Say Something”—as well as album cuts that might generously be considered B-sides, like the fan favorite “Feel No Ways.” (Drake’s two-night Apollo shows this past January were something of a test run, in retrospect.)
At one point, Drake even opened up about his earliest memories of performing at the Chicago arena, taking the audience back to the days when a young Aubrey Graham was trying to establish himself in the crowded Young Money rotation. “I had this memory [where] I was standing at the top of the ramp for a Lil Wayne show. It was me, Mack Maine, Nicki [Minaj] and a couple other people, and we were just standing there with all the Lil Wayne fans hoping that somebody would notice us, hoping that somebody would take a picture with us,” Drake said. “And they came to my dressing room today and they told me that there are 19,000 people here to see little ol’ Drake.”
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Of course, he still found time for newer tracks like “BackOutsideBoyz” and “Jumbotron Shit Poppin.” A brief DJ interlude included some of Drake’s poppier records like “Find Your Love” and “One Dance,” before co-headliner 21 Savage took over and brought a menacing chill over the arena. When Drake returned, he wore a mask and blood-red butcher’s apron for “Knife Talk,” as a Ghostface-style horror villain hung suspended from the ceiling. The pair reeled off four more tracks, including three from their Her Loss album, and “Jimmy Cooks” off Honestly, Nevermind.
Producer BNYX (who produced Drake’s conspicuous Kim K-sampling track “Search and Rescue” earlier this year) shared that the tour was executive produced by himself and Noah “40” Shebib, Drake’s longtime collaborator. BNYX revealed that they revamped many of the older tracks to “[make] a lot of the songs sound bigger and hit harder.”
One poignant aspect of the show was the presence of a massive Virgil Abloh statue, a nod to Drake’s late friend and collaborator, who grew up in Illinois and first cut his teeth in Chicago. From tribute tattoos, dedicating last year’s Honestly, Nevermind to “our brother V,” and including that album’s hit song “Sticky” with a classic Virgil soundbyte, Drake continues to honor his late friend on a grand, public scale.
Drake has spent much of 2023 uncharacteristically out of the beef cycle after igniting a run of feuds on last year’s Her Loss. (He’s still a crucial supporting character in the bad blood between Jim Jones and Clipse, however.) But the roar of a supportive crowd had Drake feeling zesty: During one moment of crowd banter, he took aim not only at listeners who have criticized the quantity of his recent output, but also at peers who are less prolific.
“I saw people complaining about how much music I put out but I look around and see all these faces and realize it’s summertime and I have to give you some shit. I’m not like the rest of these guys that take three, four, five, years off and not say anything about it,” Drake said.
Most took this as another subliminal in the long-standing—but, it should be noted, entirely assumed—cold war that Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been embroiled in for the last decade.
One shot that was very clear? A headline ticker read: “The overrated and over-awarded hit song ‘This is America’ was originally a Drake diss record.” Donald Glover told GQ earlier in 2023 that the original conception of the track was for it to be “a funny way” of provoking Drake, but that after spending more time with the beat he decided to pivot.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Drake tour without some visual provocation—this is the guy who’s recently been wearing outfits that say “Hard Feelings, Harder Dick,” after all. The second-most-shared graphic from last night’s show has been a projection of floating sperm that appear to swim over Drake’s head as he performs. Maybe he’s taking the rumination on how he got here a little too far back, but as with lots of late-career Drake shenanigans, maybe the provocation is the point.