ENTERTAINMENT

 Rappers Are Singers Now. Thank Drake.

At the end of 2009, the most popular song in the country was “Empire State of Mind,” the hoary, inflated, thudding collaboration between Jay-Z and Alicia Keys. It was perhaps the final evolutionary form — a mealy and edgeless arena ballad — of the rapper-singer collaborations that, over the prior two-plus decades, had come to dominate hip-hop and, increasingly, pop.

By that point, the formula — a rapper brings narrative, and a singer brings pathos, joy or sensuality — was still largely unquestioned. But in truth, songs like this had become rote and unimaginative.

That same year, someone finally noticed, and in one fell swoop, solved the problem.

Drake’s “So Far Gone” mixtape — released in February 2009 — marked the arrival of new path: singing as rapping, rapping as singing, singing and rapping all woven together into one holistic whole. Drake exploded the notion that those component parts had to be delivered by two different people, and also deconstructed what was expected from each of them. His hip-hop was fluid, not dogmatic. And in so remaking it, he set the template for what would eventually become the global pop norm.

To say Drake upended those conventions isn’t nearly strong enough. He fundamentally rewrote the rules of what it meant to be a rapper in the 2010s. Before him, Kanye West and Lil Wayne had fiddled around with melodic rapping — T-Pain, too, of course — but Drake made it a whole worldview, and by the time of his 2010 debut album “Thank Me Later,” he’d quickly become the most popular figure in the genre.

In Drake’s hands, rapping and singing were in constant, graceful dialogue. He was able to be tough and tender, write chest-puffing boasts that felt shocking and also the catchy hooks that made them go down easily. And he also knew how to render bravado using soothing coos, and intimacy using stern barks. Even though they were overtly radical, his musical choices seemed self-evident and effortless.

Is it any wonder everyone fell in line behind him? By 2012, hip-hop in Atlanta — where the genre’s most rapid stylistic turnover happens — was beginning to melt. Future was beginning his ascendance to narcotized, ecstatic moan-rapper. Young Thug was on his way to becoming the standard-bearer for the new rap psychedelia. Rich Homie Quan’s “Type of Way” was dizzyingly triumphant. Come 2014, Rae Sremmurd, the sweet-voiced brother duo refined saccharine sing-rapping.

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