Long before Drake became one of the biggest rappers in the world, millions of television viewers knew him by another name.
Jimmy Brooks.
The Canadian teenager spent years playing a high school basketball player on Degrassi: The Next Generation. At the time, acting appeared to be his future.
Behind the scenes, however, Aubrey Drake Graham was becoming increasingly serious about music.
He began making mixtapes while still appearing on television. Then came Lil Wayne, Young Money, So Far Gone and a remarkable transformation.
The former child actor became Drake.
And Drake would eventually help change what mainstream hip-hop sounded like.
Growing Up in Toronto
Aubrey Drake Graham was born October 24, 1986, in Toronto, Ontario.
Music already existed within his family.
His father, Dennis Graham, was a drummer who worked with rock-and-roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis. His mother, Sandi Graham, was a Canadian teacher who raised Drake primarily in Toronto after his parents separated when he was about five.
His parents came from very different backgrounds.
Dennis was a Black musician from Memphis. Sandi was a white Canadian Jew.
Drake was raised Jewish and had a bar mitzvah at 13. He has spoken about growing up with both his Black and Jewish identities and sometimes feeling different from the people around him.
His relationship with Toronto would eventually become central to his music.
But music wasn’t what first made him famous.
Television was.
Becoming Jimmy Brooks
Drake’s entry into acting came through a classmate whose father worked as an agent.
That connection led to an audition.
In 2001, the teenager landed the role of Jimmy Brooks on the Canadian television series Degrassi: The Next Generation.
Jimmy was initially a popular basketball player.
Then one of the show’s most memorable storylines changed the character permanently. Jimmy was shot by another student and began using a wheelchair.
For Drake, Degrassi became much more than an after-school acting job.
He remained with the series for years and became recognizable to an entire generation of Canadian television viewers.
But acting wasn’t paying enough to make his future secure.
Drake later described a period when his mother was ill and finances were difficult. The income from Degrassi helped support them, but he was already looking toward something bigger.
He was recording music.
The Mixtape Years
Drake released his first mixtape, Room for Improvement, in 2006.
Then came Comeback Season in 2007.
These early recordings reveal an artist still developing his identity. Drake could rap, but he was also comfortable singing.
That combination would eventually become crucial.
Hip-hop had certainly featured rappers who sang before Drake. R&B and rap had been interacting for decades.
But Drake made the emotional movement between the two styles central to his identity.
He could deliver a confident rap verse and then move into a vulnerable R&B melody without treating the two approaches as separate careers.
His breakthrough mixtape, So Far Gone, arrived in 2009.
This time, the music industry couldn’t ignore him.
Lil Wayne Changes the Story
Lil Wayne became one of the most important figures in Drake’s career.
Wayne recognized his potential and brought him into the Young Money orbit.
The timing could hardly have been better.
Lil Wayne was one of hip-hop’s biggest stars, and his support gave Drake credibility and exposure just as the Toronto artist was breaking through.
Drake eventually signed with Young Money Entertainment.
Suddenly, the former Degrassi actor was working alongside some of the biggest names in rap.
But celebrity connections alone would not have sustained the career.
Drake needed records.
He had them.
Thank Me Later
Drake’s debut studio album, Thank Me Later, arrived in 2010.
By then, expectations were enormous.
Instead of collapsing under them, Drake established himself as a major recording artist.
The album debuted at No. 1 in the United States and helped move him decisively beyond the “actor who became a rapper” description.
Yet his next album would become even more important.
Take Care Defines the Drake Sound
Released in 2011, Take Care became one of the defining albums of Drake’s career.
The record leaned heavily into atmosphere, loneliness, relationships, fame and emotional uncertainty.
Drake wasn’t afraid to sound wounded.
That mattered.
Mainstream rap had long celebrated confidence, toughness and success. Drake could do all of that, but he was equally willing to make music about insecurity, failed relationships and wondering why someone hadn’t called.
His combination of introspective rap and R&B singing helped push hip-hop further toward the genre-fluid environment that dominates popular music today. AllMusic credits his sensitive R&B vocals and introspective rap style as central features of his career.
Take Care later won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album.
Drake was no longer merely successful.
He was influencing the direction of popular music.
Nothing Was the Same
The title of his 2013 album said it perfectly.
Nothing Was the Same.
Drake had transformed from Canadian television actor to international recording star in only a few years.
The album reinforced his ability to move comfortably between aggressive rap, melodic hooks and reflective songwriting.
His connection to Toronto also became increasingly prominent.
Drake wasn’t trying to disguise where he came from.
He made Toronto part of the mythology.
The city became “The 6.” Its cold weather, neighborhoods, skyline and nightlife repeatedly appeared throughout his lyrics and imagery.
For a Canadian rapper attempting to dominate an American-centered genre, that hometown identity became an advantage rather than a limitation.
Building OVO
Drake’s ambitions extended beyond his own recordings.
He helped establish OVO Sound, turning the October’s Very Own identity surrounding his career into a record label and larger cultural brand.
The company provided another platform for Canadian artists and producers while strengthening Toronto’s position within contemporary hip-hop and R&B.
Drake also played an important role in bringing attention to artists emerging from his city.
His association with The Weeknd during the singer’s early career is one prominent example.
The center of hip-hop gravity had expanded.
Toronto mattered.
“Hotline Bling” Shows Another Side
Few songs demonstrate Drake’s ability to exist simultaneously as musician and internet phenomenon better than “Hotline Bling.”
Released in 2015, the song became inseparable from its music video.
Drake’s dancing inspired memes almost immediately.
Instead of damaging the record, the jokes made it even bigger.
That ability to participate in internet culture became one of Drake’s unusual strengths.
He could be one of music’s biggest stars while allowing himself to become a meme.
The distinction between promotion, pop culture and internet humor began disappearing.
Drake understood that world remarkably well.
Views Brings Toronto to the Center
Drake’s 2016 album Views placed Toronto directly at the center of his artistic identity.
Its cover showed him sitting atop the city’s CN Tower — digitally, of course — while the music continued blending rap, R&B, pop and international influences.
“One Dance” became one of the era’s defining recordings.
The song’s global sound reflected something increasingly important about Drake.
He was willing to absorb musical influences from outside conventional North American hip-hop.
Dancehall, Afrobeats, UK rap and other styles increasingly appeared around his work.
Sometimes that openness brought praise.
Sometimes it brought criticism over questions of borrowing, authenticity and cultural ownership.
Either way, Drake kept moving.
Scorpion and Life Under a Microscope
By 2018, Drake’s personal life had become almost impossible to separate from his music.
His feud with rapper Pusha T became especially consequential.
During their exchange of diss records, Pusha T publicly revealed that Drake had a son, Adonis.
Drake subsequently addressed fatherhood on Scorpion.
The album included “God’s Plan,” “Nice for What” and “In My Feelings,” and demonstrated just how enormous Drake’s audience had become.
The private person who once wrote introspective songs about relationships was now living under intense public scrutiny.
That tension would increasingly define the next phase of his career.
Fatherhood
Drake’s son, Adonis, was born in 2017.
His relationship with fatherhood became another recurring subject in his life and music.
Drake has discussed wanting to approach parenting differently from his own childhood experience. His parents separated when he was young, and his father lived primarily in Memphis while Drake remained with his mother in Toronto.
Adonis has since appeared publicly alongside his father and even contributed artwork associated with Drake’s music.
For an artist who built much of his career around documenting his personal life, fatherhood naturally became part of that story.
Drake Versus Kendrick Lamar
Then came the most consequential rap battle of Drake’s career.
Tension between Drake and Kendrick Lamar had existed for years, but in 2024 it exploded into a series of increasingly personal diss tracks.
The battle became a major cultural event.
Both artists attacked the other’s credibility, character and personal life.
The feud went far beyond two rappers exchanging clever verses. It sparked arguments about hip-hop authenticity, race, celebrity, masculinity and Drake’s position within rap culture itself.
For perhaps the first time in years, Drake’s dominance appeared genuinely vulnerable.
Yet the battle also demonstrated something remarkable.
Nearly two decades after his first mixtape, Drake remained important enough that a rap feud involving him could command worldwide attention.
Why Drake Changed Hip-Hop
Drake’s influence isn’t simply about record sales or hit songs.
His biggest contribution may be emotional range.
He helped normalize the idea that a mainstream rapper could sing extensively, talk openly about romantic insecurity and make atmospheric R&B without abandoning his identity as a rapper.
That approach became so common that it is easy to forget how distinctive it once seemed.
A generation of artists grew up in a musical environment where the boundaries between rapper and singer were increasingly irrelevant.
Drake didn’t create that movement by himself.
But he became one of its most important figures.
Apple describes his catalog as helping bring R&B grooves and emotionally direct lyrics deeper into mainstream hip-hop.
From Jimmy Brooks to Drake
There is something almost improbable about Drake’s career when viewed from the beginning.
A Canadian teenager becomes an actor.
The actor begins making mixtapes.
The mixtapes attract Lil Wayne.
The aspiring rapper becomes a superstar.
The superstar helps turn Toronto into an internationally recognized center for hip-hop and R&B.
Along the way, Drake transformed vulnerability into a commercial strength and blurred lines between musical genres that once seemed much more rigid.
His career has included criticism, feuds, personal controversies and constant arguments about his place within hip-hop.
But one fact is difficult to dispute.
Drake changed the sound of mainstream rap.
And the kid who once played Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi eventually created a role far bigger than anything television could have written for him.
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