Like Ola Ray in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, Drake awakens at the end of the visual accompaniment to “In My Feelings” both terrified and relieved, explaining to a friend in his trailer, “I just had the craziest dream. I just had a dream that I made some song about some girl. There was a house in New Orleans, a grill in my mouth and then this kid from New York that spits when he talks all the time did some dance to it and then the world did the dance and Will Smith was there…and just nobody would stop, it was terrible.” The “kid from New York,” if you don’t by now, is Shiggy, and the dance, as you surely must be aware (due to a hazardousness that has gotten the Transportation Department involved) is the #InMyFeelings challenge.
Possibly wanting to both honor the obsession and simultaneously put it to rest by placing a cap on the whole thing with this video, Drake leaves the storyline in the capable hands of his new go-to director, Karena Evans (who interned with another staple of the Drake music video canon, Director X–they’re both Canadians. You’ve got to keep it Canadian with Drake). True to the slow, I’ma break you off pace of the last video she delivered, “I’m Upset,” Evans opens on a typically unashamed to be a little bitch Drake getting out of the passenger’s side of his best friend’s ride, a black Escalade (the primo vehicle for getting the perfect shot of any #InMyFeelings attempts). The house is quintessential New Orleans: creepy without trying, the kind of place you’re definitely going to be possessed by the ghosts of some white people in. But that doesn’t matter to Drake, who needs to woo Keke (played by, of all people La La Anthony, forever immortalized as an MTV VJ) by any means necessary, even if it requires enduring her shade, “If you love me, then make them other girls in your phone disappear.” Or, even worse, her mother, played with effortless light-hearted acrimony by Phylicia “Claire Huxtable” Rashad (an icon who still can’t make rewatching The Cosby Show palatable) intervening in the Romeo and Juliet display with, “This is not a Taye Diggs movie, sir. You a grown man! Carry yo ass on home now.”
Instead, Drake takes to the streets in the daytime hours as all the fine people of New Orleans seem unable to contain themselves with the choreography now burned into all our brains thanks to Shiggy, the man who orchestrated the madness interwoven in scenes throughout, ranging from a streetcar to Drake’s aforementioned dressing room. That Shiggy and Drake must come face to face is an inevitability, but before that happens, City Girls, the duo comprised of Yung Miami and JT (recently out of the mix to serve a two-year sentence for credit card fraud) make a cameo–or Yung Miami does–to iterate that one minute you can be selling clothes on Instagram, and the next be on a Drake single. Must refrain from saying something like, “The American dream is still possible.”
Soon, the disease–the Drake fever–has spread to a massive parking garage, where the open square shapes of the multi-storied edifice allow Evans the opportunity for an epic shot, and a nod to the fact that the #InMyFeelings challenge is largely contingent upon having a vehicle. With everyone getting into the spirit on Bourbon Street (though, it’s not hard to be spirited regardless of what dance you’re doing in the French Quarter), Shiggy ends up taking his shirt off on the streetcar while Keke does end up deciding that Drake is worth giving a chance by showing up to the place he said he would be (much to Ms. Rashad’s dismay, one imagines).
The “it was all a dream angle,” of course, lends a tongue-in-cheek feel to the video, with Evans and Drake acknowledging just how cuckoo it is that, of all the many songs on the twenty-five track double album, this was the one plucked from obscurity to create a life-threatening dance phenomenon.
