Hello Namaste: In 2016, Drake Yoga Is A Thing

What is Drake? It’s a question worth asking. For in Drake, we see what ought to be a fairly common showbiz hyphenate gone supernova — he is not so much a rapper/singer/actor/producer as a kind of generational totem. Drake is a meme with a heart. Drake is a bad poet, a laughable dancer whose moves and rhymes approach something that is just out of our sentimental grasp, and yet, there is something there, something that compels. I swear I’m not fucking with you. This is what I feel when I sit down and actually listen to Drake, contemplatively and away from where Drake’s music is most commonly experienced — in retail environments, half-heard out of passing cars, pumping out of a window a few houses away. Perhaps it’s best to put it this way: Drake is a system of signs.

Yoga, by contrast, is the opposite of that. Yoga is a system of physical, mental and spiritual practices; where Drake is a system of inert symbols, yoga is active on every plane available to us (and some that are more elusive). But we live in the age of the portmanteau that comes to life, whether it’s the Cronut or this very website’s name. And so we have Namasdrake, a national touring event series featuring an hour-long vinyasa flow yoga session soundtracked by two DJs mixing nothing but Drake tracks. In Philly, the event has sold out within a week of its announcement.

As we have established, Drake is a system of signs. It is up to us how we choose to interpret them.