Drake's fans won't wait to thank him later

What is it like to be Drake? Wouldn't you like to know.

And now you shall. With Thank Me Later, the major-label bow from the preordained face of hip hop, all is revealed. "Money just changed everything," Drake raps on Fireworks, the opening track off a highly anticipated disc that leaked earlier this month but officially drops Tuesday, "I wonder how life without it would go." The Torontonian once known as Aubrey Graham ponders frequently on Thank Me Later, an album of 14 well-considered songs that comment on his own status as a fast-rising hip-hopper who is both excitedly adored and enviously hated. He has known romantic triumph, but letdowns too. And there is a vulnerability to a former child actor who displays an inevitable cockiness.

On Fireworks, which features popping starbursts and pop star Alicia Key's crooning, the well-hyped and extensively groomed recording artist comments that his "15 minutes started an hour ago." Indeed there is an overwhelming sense of a fully formed phenom at work in real time: "I'm on the brink of influential," he acknowledges on the song Thank Me Now. The Resistance hears "I'm living inside the moment, not taking pictures to save it." And on Fireworks, "Lookin' down from the top and its crowded below."

All this from a 23-year-old non-musician who has yet to release his first mainstream album. Typing furiously, Drake is relating his autobiography as fast as it happens.

Reacting to the pace that sometimes kills, the singing rapper admits to some bewilderment. On Over: "I swear it feels like the last few nights we've been everywhere and back," he laconically half-raps, his Auto-Tuned voice soaked with fatigue. "But I just can't remember it all - what am I doing, what am I doing?" Then he rights himself: "Oh yeah, that's right, I'm doing me, I'm doing me."

Drake's jet lag is understandable: The album was recorded and mixed in at least eight different cities, including Honolulu, and three different studios in Toronto. Guest artists include rapping-royalty members Jay-Z, T.I., Young Jeezy and Drake-mentor Lil Wayne, the incarcerated, golden-toothed tattoo canvas who, on Miss Me, comments upon his prison release date, "Damn, I'll be gone till November."

There are references to some of the major events of Drake's life. On Miss Me, "gone for my surgery, but now I'm back again" refers to a basketball-related knee injury. "I went with Sprite instead," on The Resistance, is a million-dollar shout-out to a certain clear, lemon-lime-flavoured, caffeine-free soft drink which Drake endorses for a fee. On the same song, the line "or the two guns in my face during the stick-up" is an obvious reference to a gunpoint robbery at a Toronto eatery in 2009.

A part of Fireworks refers to a short fling with the Barbadian singer Rihanna, whom Drake famously dismissed to the press as a friend, not a romantic interest.

From the second verse: "What happened between us that night it always seems to trouble me/ Now all of a sudden these gossip rags wanna cover me."

An accidental pregnancy is revealed in The Resistance: "Plus this woman that I messed with unprotected, texting saying that she wish she would've kept it."

The dominant lyrical themes however, relate to Drake's wrestles with fame and hype. With stardom comes envy, as noted on Up All Night ("niggas with no money act like money isn't everything/ I'm having a good time, they just trying to ruin it"). As for the pressure thrust upon the young star, Drake is conscious of a duty not only to represent the Toronto hip-hop scene ("carried the weight for my city like a cargo ship") but to rejuvenate the genre. "Cuz while all my closest friends out partying, I'm just here making all the music that they party to."

What is most clear is that Drake, who wonders how young one can die from old age, is prepared to man up. "I gotta feel alive, even it kills me," he raps on the moody Light Up. "I promise to always give you me, the real me."

Drake sees himself at hip hop's service. Some are thanking him already; some will thank him later; and some, he probably knows, won't thank him at all.