Community and Vocation thanks to Drake

So there are many parts of Hip-Hop that I have a hard time with.  Over the course of the past 20 some years I feel as a genre it has headed in the wrong direction and the lifestyle that surrounds it has strayed a far way from its inception.  However, I still consider myself to be an avid hip-hop enthusiast and I feel that I know a few things about the genre.  I am sure that I am going to be getting into all of these topics multiple times over the course of this blog however for right now I just want to write a short piece on my man Drake.

Now granted Drake has his flaws and some might not even put him into the category of hip-hop at all, but I believe that he brings something interesting and fascinating to the genre.  Granted he is not the first and won't be the last but he seems to display this confidence in himself that seems to be lost in the public sphere.  The track that caught my eye today, while I should have been finishing my sermon for sunday, is "Over" off of Thank Me Later which is his debut album from 2010.  I have included the video below(it's pretty bad) and keep in mind it is NSFW.  

He is someone who has seen great deal of success over the course of his career but what strikes me about his music is that he seems to have a keen eye on what this success has brought him and stays focused on what he is striving to be.   In the song he states that "I know way too many people here right now that I didn't know last year."  Also he keeps returning the question, what am I doing..."what am I doing, what am I doing? oh yeah thats right, I'm doing me, I'm doing me" Grammar and the English language aside I believe that he hits on two parts of our culture that gets the best of us.  

First, as our life goes on we are surrounded by different and various people over the course of the years.  Some are good and positive influences in our lives and some aren't.  Some help to ground us in who we are and what we should be doing with out lives, which is what a community should be doing.  However, there are those that are not bringing about that positive community around us.  The second thing is that often times when we get surrounded by these people or bad communities they distract us from who we are supposed to be and who we were created to be.  That is the role community plays in our lives and what we need to be reminded of.  We were created with specific skills, abilities, talents and are called to use those in our lives.  The community that surrounds us in the world is what helps bring those things about and bring them out of us.  We might get lost along the way but there are those people and those communities that help remind us of what we should doing...Keep Doing Me and being the people we were created to be not following the popular opinion of the world.