At this very moment, Drake is getting thousands of people to talk about "their feelings" on the internet. That’s one of my favorite parts of social media: It allows us to feel en masse. During trending events or times of heightened emotion or the death of a public figure, Twitter becomes an amorphous organism that slithers toward a broad feeling, or undergoes mitosis and splits into a shouting match full of hiss and noise, all about whether or not Margaret Thatcher deserves to be mourned or Miley’s a racist or the VMAs were bad or Drake is good. This broad-spectrum communication arena has become a place where people will broadcast their feelings in hopes of landing near the center of the broad spectrum so perhaps they can feel validated. It feels like you're always surrounded by that friend who watches a movie and then looks at you to see if you're also laughing at the joke they’re laughing at.

Drake is great at creating these widespread moments, but that doesn’t necessarily make him emotional or soft. Drake sells feelings. As a guy who says he’s "rich enough that I don’t have to tell 'em that I’m rich" he sells feelings that he can literally afford to sell. He sells feelings as a most improper noun ("got me in my feelings", "my feels") that carries more cultural and social cache than any kind of emotion that might actually stem from Aubrey Graham. Because we all possess emotions, but not everyone has Drake's ubiquitous fame, $30 million fortune, and a moratorium on new friends. So when we listen to Drake, what are we really connecting with? Are we connecting with his emotions, or are we connecting with the idyllic environment in which he gets to emote? Or is Drake just like Twitter -- another vehicle that allows us to feel en masse in broad, unspecific emotions?

This is not meant to be critical judgement on Nothing Was the Same as a piece of music (I really like it) but lest we go on calling Drake "soft" and "sad-boy" and "emotional", there’s a differentiation to be made between someone who puts out a communally emotional record, and someone who is actually emotional and writes music that reflects that.

I don’t mean to go down where Drake works and smack the Kleenex out of his hand, but I used to be emotional for a living. You know those Shakespeare performances that interrupted your morning classes in high school? I was an actor in one of those things for two consecutive years, delivering iambic pentameter to 300 bored kids in an auditorium or gym or cafeteria at unspeakable hours of the morning. For one of the years, I played Romeo, one of the most emotional characters Shakespeare ever wrote. For an entire year, I would wander out into the audience and defer to some fidgety teenager in a hoodie as I rapturously soliloquized about Juliet’s eyeballs. I’d guess 90% of the time I was met with uncomfortable giggles, and look, I'll shoulder some of the blame. There’s a reason why I’m not doing much of that anymore.

But one of Romeo’s most famous lines comes in Act V, when he learns (falsely) that Juliet’s dead. The line, "I defy you, stars!" is usually directed to be the embodiment of all of the horrible shit that has happened to him up until this point, including the murder of his best friend, the murder of his love’s cousin, and him being banished from his love (Leo totally nails it). The stakes are ridiculously high and for every show, I would have to "get there." There’s no whispering the line, no ironic commentary, no "lol stars you crazy for this one," just whatever I could sum up in the moment to imbue that line with as much truth as possible. Depending on the day, that too was met with uncomfortable giggles.