When I look back on Drake’s Saturday night performance at the Dubai International Stadium years from now, all I’m going to be able to tell people is: you had to be there.
See, the Drake I’m used to is the cocky one on all the records. The kind of guy who makes music for that person who needs to feel like they’re untouchable. The kind of guy who writes lyrics about having wads of money so thick that he could stack them up and climb them to outer space. The kind of guy who needs “no new friends, no new friends, no new friends, no, no new.”
But the Drake I saw on stage last night, playing to more than 16,000 people, who might as well have been his closest companions in a city he’s been dreaming of visiting for at least 10 years, was a Drake driven on pure adrenalin, awe, humility and vulnerability.
At 28-years-old — yelling out variations of “Yallah, yallah!” and “Mashallah!” with the enthusiasm of a kid hopped up on too much sugar — Drake was the image of a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young guy from Toronto living out his wildest dreams.
“Tonight for me is an emotional night. It’s a special night. I don’t think you understand. This is one of the greatest places on earth and you’ve already given me so much,” he told the crowd, right after kicking off with his flashy show opener, Trophies.
From then on, he didn’t leave the crowd hanging for a second, powering through some of his biggest hits. Headlines, Best I Ever Had, The Motto, Truffle Butter and Find Your Love were just a small sampling of the set list, sung in between cameos from his OVO buddies OB O’Brien and P Reign. His performance of the Big Sean track Blessings came with a backdrop video of him and his crew sand-duning around Dubai.
“This is the best time I’ve had in my entire life,” he said, hailing the audience as the best yet of his month-long tour.
When time came for Crew Love, his collaboration track with prodigy the Weeknd, Drake asked the crowd to sing the first half of the song for him and promised that if they did that, he would “go so hard on this stage, I might pass out.” At that point in the show, passing out didn’t seem like a complete impossibility. Things took on a more intimate pace around the one hour mark. In a circle of sky-high, vertical light beams that looked like they were ready to zap Drake to his home planet, he performed a delicate, part-a cappella version of Hold On, We’re Going Home, spending the last half of it serenading individual audience members, from the person who was holding up a Toronto Blue Jays sign on the left to the person in a Raptor’s jersey on the right.
“I feel like I’m already home,” he crooned. “I might make Dubai my home.”
The rapper pumped the crowd up again with Know Yourself, All Me, HYFR, Energy, and, of course, an obligatory lyric change: “I was running through Dubai with my woes.”
He capped off his hour-and-a-half performance with the in-your-face anthem of success Started from the Bottom, then took out his in-ears to soak up the resounding screams of the crowd.
“This is probably the most important concert of my life,” he declared, followed by a promise to be back soon — perhaps as soon as the next album. If the resulting cheers were anything to go by, thousands of people will be holding him to it.
