Drake – "Child's Play" (2016)

Why you gotta fight with me at Cheesecake?

You know I love to go there!

Monique Santos is not a fan of Cheesecake Factory restaurants.

“Who the hell is Monique Santos?” I hear you saying to your significant other – or perhaps to your dog – as you read this post. “Why should I give a sh*t that she’s not a fan of Cheesecake Factory?”

To answer your first question, Monique Santos is some random woman who is seen in a recent TikTok video refusing to get out of the car when a prospective beau takes her to Cheesecake Factory for their first date.  Apparently that restaurant doesn’t meet Monique’s very high standards. 

Monique Santos

To answer your second question, you should you give a sh*t about Monique Santos’s opinion of Cheesecake Factory because she is a yuuuuge star as a result of this video (which has been viewed about ten zillion times).  All the cool kids are talking about her, dontcha know.

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I’m guessing my late father had very little in common with Monique Santos, but he did share her distaste for the Cheesecake Factory.

That distaste was manifested about 20 years ago, when my wife and kids and I travelled to Kansas City for our annual holiday get-together with my parents and sister.  

One night, we decided to go to a Cheesecake Factory restaurant for dinner.  For some reason, my father was in a foul mood that evening.  (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.). He flipped through the menu with a disdainful expression on his face, then announced, “There’s nothin’ here I want to eat.”

A Cheesecake Factory restaurant

The Cheesecake Factory menu is 20-plus pages long, and has over 250 items.  It has salads, sandwiches, hamburgers, steaks, seafood, pastas, pizzas, omelets . . . in other words, it has EVERYTHING.  

My father was a somewhat picky eater, but his pronouncement had everything to do with his p*ssy mood and nothing to do with the items listed on the Cheesecake Factory menu.

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Drake is a really big deal.

He has sold more digital singles in the United States than any other recording artist.  

He has won five Grammy Awards, six American Music Awards, a record 34 Billboard Music Awards.  

Drake

Drake has 13 number-one hits on the Billboard “Hot 100,” and has had the most “Hot 100” top ten singles (76) and the highest total number of records to chart on the “Hot 100” (321).  He is also the artist who has had the most number-one singles on the “Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs” and “Hot Rap Songs” charts.

As today’s featured song notes, Drake likes the Cheesecake Factory.  You’d best believe that if Drake took Monique Santos to the Cheesecake Factory, she wouldn’t refuse to get out of the car because it wasn’t good enough for her. 

Click here to listen to “Child’s Play,” which was released in 2016 on Drake’s fourth studio album, Views.

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Drake – "Started from the Bottom" (2013)

I'ma worry ‘bout me

Give a f*ck about you

Hip-hop has been the world’s dominant musical genre for years.

So I would be remiss if I didn’t include at least one overrated or underrated rapper in this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days.” 

Yes, I know that I did write about the grossly overrated Hamilton.  But Hamilton is hip-hop “lite’ – hip-hop for white people, if you will.  So it doesn’t really count. 

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I am a fan of rap music, and know more about it than you would expect an old white guy to know.

For example, I was the only person on my millennial-dominated trivia team to know what the title of Wu-Tang Clan’s 1994 “C.R.E.A.M.” – one of their greatest rap songs ever – meant.  (Those letters stand for “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” of course.)

But to be honest, my knowledge of rap/hip-hop is limited – I am far from being an expert.

So I turned to the NegusWhoRead website for help identifying overrated and underrated hip-hop artists, and found a post by Michael Harriot titled “The Ten Most Overrated Rappers of All Time” . . . just what I was looking for!

One of Harriott’s choices was Drake, the Canadian-born rapper who is currently the most popular hip-hop artists in the world.  

Drake

Drake has sold over 170 million records worldwide.  He has placed an astonishing 205 songs on the Billboard “Hot 100” – more than any solo artist in history – and in July 2018, he had seven songs in the Billboard top ten at the same time, which is simply mind-boggling.  (Drake had a record total of 12 top ten songs in 2018, one more than the Beatles had in 1964.)  Given the extent of his popularity, he is almost per se overrated.

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Here’s what Harriott had to say about Drake:

Drake raps light skinnededededed.

I’m not referring to this sensitive raps or his atonal crooning.  I’m talking about his voice.  When black people try to imitate how white people sound, they do Drake’s voice.  Drake’s voice is made of lukewarm herbal tea flavored with warm milk and melted snow.  It is like natural gas – colorless and odorless. . . . I know his lyrics make women ovulate and men reminisce about their ex-girlfriends, but they are just solid. . . .

I had to stop talking to a friend because he told me he cried listening to a Drake song.

I don’t have any false ideas of masculinity, but if Drake songs make you teary-eyed, you aren’t built for the struggle. 

Also, he's Canadian.

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Click here to listen to Drake’s 2013 hit, “Started from the Bottom,” which reached #6 on the Billboard “Hot 100” and #2 on the Billboard “Hot Rap Songs” charts.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Drake (ft. Lil Wayne and Tyga) – "The Motto" (2011)

You only live once

That's the motto, n*gga

YOLO

As we learned in the last 2 or 3 lines, Maryland has a politically incorrect state song.  So it seems only fitting that Maryland has a politically incorrect state motto as well.

The Maryland state song – “Maryland, My Maryland” – was written by a pro-Confederate poet.  It urges Marylanders to stand with their sister slave states and spurn President Lincoln and his Union scum.

The state motto – Fatti maschii, parole femine, which is usually translated as “Manly deeds, womanly words”– is politically incorrect in a completely different way, of course.  The problem with it is sexism, not racism.

Maryland's coat of arms

For reasons that are not entirely clear, Fatti maschii, parole femine became part of the shield of the Calverts, the English Catholic family that founded Maryland.  It was then incorporated into Maryland’s coat of arms.

Not surprisingly, no other state has an Italian motto.

According to a spokesman at the Italian Embassy in Washington, the motto is derived from a comment made by Pope Clement VII in the 16th century.

Pope Clement VII

The words . . . are generally understood to mean “men do things, and women talk about things.” Another, wordier, translation: “When you need things done, ask a man, because women only talk and don’t arrive to a conclusion.”

Those translations of Fatti maschii, parole femine certainly suggest that males are superior to females.  But I don’t think that the official translation – “Manly deeds, womanly words” – belittles women at all.

“Manly deeds, womanly words” may be sexist in the sense that it stereotypes men and women, but it doesn’t stereotype women negatively.

As I understand it, that translation merely suggests that men are from Mars, and women are from Venus.  Men deal with conflict by taking action – they speak softly, but carry a big stick.  Women, by contrast, solve problems by talking through them.  

Maryland's real state motto

Sometimes, it’s best to maintain the peace through negotiation and compromise.  Other times, you have to take a stand.  Soldiers aren’t superior to diplomats (or vice versa) any more than a Phillips-head screwdriver is superior to a straight screwdriver – different tasks require different tools.

Scientists have shown that there are significant differences between men and women as a whole when it comes to mental health, cognitive abilities, personality, and aggressiveness.  

For example, according to the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, the fact that males are generally more aggressive than females is one of the most robust and oldest findings in psychology.  Scientific studies have found that males of all ages engage in more physical and verbal aggression than females.  Aggressive behavior by females tends to be more indirect in nature — e.g., spreading negative rumors, or gossiping.

Women are stereotypically viewed as more emotional than men.  But some studies suggest that while women are more likely to express their emotions, both sexes experience the same amount of emotion.  

It comes as no surprise to me that a 2014 meta-analysis of 355 studies measuring narcissism found that men score significantly higher on narcissism than women.  The authors of that meta-analysis  noted that gender differences in narcissism represents true differences in personality traits, including men’s heightened sense of entitlement and authority.

Narcissus was a male, after all

It is unclear exactly how much of the difference between the sexes is a cultural phenomenon and how much relates relates to differences in the structure and function of the male and female brains or other biological distinctions, but it seems likely that both nurture and nature are somewhat responsible for the observed differences.

One final note.  Boys cry about as often as girls at age 12, but 18-year-old females cry four times as much as 18-year-old males.  (I don’t know what that means, but it was interesting to me.)

“The Motto” (which was released in late 2011) was a hit for the Toronto-born rapper Drake.  Some have criticized Drake for buying into the “You only live once” mindset, but I think “You only live once” ("YOLO" for short) is a much better motto than Fatti maschii, parole femine.  

Here’s the official music video for “The Motto”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: