Please don’t fall off the massive Drake ice block
Toronto police are monitoring the Iceman promo-monument after fans built a fire on top of it
Some musicians hire publicists to announce new projects via press release. Others put a single on the radio. And then there’s Drake, a veritable mastermind of promo cycle antics, who arranged to place a massive block of ice near Sankofa Square ahead of his long-teased ninth studio album, Iceman.
At the centre of the ice block is the release date for Iceman, and fans are going to great lengths to get to it. CityNews meteorologist Jessie Uppal said it would take days for the ice to melt on its own, based on Toronto’s weather forecast. That is simply not soon enough for 6 God stans. Remember when Drake drove an ice truck around the city last summer? They’ve been waiting a long time.
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Posts on social media show hoards of people using screwdrivers, hammers, even blowtorches and axes to chip through the massive structure.
“It is genius when you think about it. It is just an amazing album rollout,” one fan told CP24. “I don’t know of any other artist that has thought of something like this and executed it like this. It is a race against time.”
While security has been on-site since the sculpture went up yesterday, police officers from three different divisions have been monitoring the area since last night, when hundreds descended on the scene, including some who climbed to the very top of it to build a fire. (A sign does indicate that “any contact with the structure is at your own risk.”)
No injuries have been reported, but large chunks have fallen to the ground.
Kids, and especially Drake-loving elder millennials, if you’re going to scale the ice block, please be careful.
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
