Drake and Future: Day and Night

A fourth grader-scribbled headline, “If You’re Reading This We Made It,” flashed along the backdrop of Drake’s headlining slot at 2015’s ACL Fest. Fast forward almost a year later to the Frank Erwin Center on Wednesday, and the Toronto MC’s eminence proved no less palpable.

Preceding Drake’s set, Atlanta rapper Future engaged in a sludgy debauchery of Xanax-riddled rhymes, pill-popping lamentations, and strip club anthems. Opening with his hit “New Level,” he took it there in a performance bolstered by dancers, lots of fire, and over 20 hyper-speed songs. In the Weeknd-assisted “Low Life” (“Turn a five-star hotel into a traphouse”) and high-octane banger “Fuck Up Some Commas” (“Full of mud, yeah, nigga get full of them drugs, yeah”), he crystallized a down-spiraled life and unfiltered inebriation.

You could almost see the Sprite and codeine slosh against Styrofoam cups and spill onto an ash-dirty carpet while he rifled through hit after hit as soft porn images lined the screens behind him. Future’s embraced his supervillain status in hip-hop. He doesn’t want to be your role model.

Drake does.

Once again, the headlining 29-year-old superstar imported plenty of pyrotechnics. “Revenge” writ large in big red letters on his T-shirt, Drake’s silhouette was obscured in a haze of smoke and white flashing lights as he emerged onstage. The nearly sold-out crowd approved.

“How am I keeping it real by keeping this shit to myself?” rapped Drake in “Summer Sixteen,” summing up his decade-long career in music on the concert’s first song.

People either hate or love Drake’s unabashed self-awareness. During the two-hour set, he meditated on his town’s favorite running back (“Child’s Play”), while indulging in stereotypical lonely ruminations (“Diamonds Dancing”). He remains the boy you can take home to the folks (“Faithful”), but he’s not above scorning his ex in a drunken stupor (“Feel No Ways”). As such, he could be the cold Scarface taking shots at Meek Mill (“Back to Back”), and also a meme-able dork (“Hotline Bling”).

In other words, Drake knows Drake.

That pingpong effect continued as he vacillated from the lovelorn, “too soft” aesthetic of somber lamentations (“Hold On, We’re Going Home”) in a sweet falsetto to explosive, self-stroked ego aplomb (“Energy”) that found him frantically jumping up and down and imitating gunplay. Then there was the charismatic R&B crooner of “One Dance,” the singer undulating and rolling his hips. Despite his overplayed charisma (ie., dopey grin), none of it felt gimmicky.

Rather, it came off like an extension of Drake’s mercurial status in hip-hop.

Raised high on a platform as watercolor blues and purples swirled the stage, he and his career retrospective necessitated shortened cuts from an extensive list of Billboard chart-toppers: the sporadic synthesized “Headlines,” trumpeted braggadocio of “Over,” bar mitzvah bash “HYFR,” rep-for-my-team banger “Started from the Bottom,” and the earnest “Worst Behavior.”

Following suit on the rest of his If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late tour, Drake closed with slow-cooked sing-along “Legend” enveloped with waves of levitating yellow orbs suspended from way up high.

“Oh my God, oh my God. If I die, I’m a legend.”