"I'm not someone you should trust, I know," Drake sings in "Childs Play." And that's what his new music video is about.
Around midnight on Saturday evening, Drake dropped his new long-form music video for "Childs Play." The clip opens with Drake in the bathroom, washing his hands, when he suddenly remembers that he left his phone on the table. In his mind's eye, he imagines his girlfriend, who is at dinner with him, going through it. That girlfriend, played by Tyra Banks, embodies the women he describes in the song: she's wildin', she's super-childish — except her outburst is completely called for.
In the three-ish minutes of hell she gives him leading up to the song, it becomes clear that they're at an anniversary dinner (at the world's nicest Cheesecake Factory) they were supposed to have the night before, but that he canceled because he had to work. His phone, however, told her a different story. He was with another woman.
"And you know what? She called you Aubrey," Banks says, landing it like a punch. "She didn't even call you Drake. She called you Aubrey, so obviously there's something a little bit more intimate for her to call you Aubrey. I call you Aubrey, you mom calls you Aubrey. Bitches call you fucking Drake."
And then comes the cheesecake smash, right into his face. It's well-deserved.
So obviously, playing into this cheating-guy stereotype, Drake goes to the strip club. Note that this wasn't his idea, his friend calls him and suggests — no, demands it. We wouldn't want to tarnish Drake's halo completely. The weird break before the strip club, where OB OBrien, friend of Drake, plays a dude named the Texas Hammer, really could have hit the cutting room floor; it's a lot of mansplaining and unnecessary dialoguing that takes away the agency of these women while utterly failing to be entertaining. Shout out to Alan Jackson's 1992 country hit "Chattahoochee" tho, apropos of nothing.
In the end, the character Drake plays, "Drake, cheater and swine," is left remorseless after a night out. The resolution to the relationship came too soon, in the form of smashed cheesecake. If you made it through that second clip of the Texas Hammer yelling, you're more committed to the 6 God than I.
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