Drake has spoken out about a photo appearing to show him in blackface, which resurfaced after rival rapper Pusha-T used it as the cover art for his diss track, ‘The Story Of Adidon’.
In the track, Pusha-T alleges that Drake has a secret son, alludes to the ‘Hotline Bling’ star’s issues with his own father and also refers to past discussions about his black identity.
However, as controversy arose when people began speculating about the origins of the photo, Drake has now set the record straight, in a post on his Instagram story.
Addressing the media “circus”, he wrote: “This was not from a clothing brand shoot or my music career.
“This picture is from 2007, a time in my life where I was an actor and I was working on a project that was about young black actors struggling to get roles, being stereotyped and typecast.
“The photos represented how African-Americans were once wrongfully portrayed in entertainment.”
Drake continued: “Me and my best friend at the time Mazin Elsadig, who is also an actor from Sudan, were attempting to use our voices to bring awareness to the issues we dealt with all the time as black actors at auditions.
“This was to highlight and raise our frustrations with not always getting a fair chance in the industry and to make a point that the struggle for black actors had not changed much.”
‘The Story Of Adidon’ - a response to Drake’s diss track ‘Duppy Freestyle’, released a day earlier - is based on the 2017 Jay-Z track ‘The Story Of O.J.’, which also dealt with themes around identity in contemporary black culture.