One thing that can be said about Drake that cannot be said about a disconcertingly large number of other famous people is that it is clear why he is famous. He has done actual things—performed some hugely popular songs about how disappointed he is in various exes; endorsed one of the better-liked lemon-lime soft drinks—that have made him famous and rich. That money has bought him extremely good tickets to Raptors games for years now, and that fame has made him useful to the team as a sort of First Fan and brand ambassador. He has his moments of excess in that role—throwing the occasional unsolicited Biden-style shoulder massage to Nick Nurse during a playoff game, say, or cutting a clammy promo in which he blinks furiously and confusingly proclaims “the Toronto Raptors are a college sports team, I promise you”—but it’s a relationship that makes sense for all involved.
As with most of Drake’s many undeniable professional accomplishments, the most remarkable thing about all this is that he’s managed to pull it off while seeming like kind of a weird dork a lot of the time. The sideline antics are his business, or anyway between him and whatever league official determines the permissible length and intensity of kamikaze in-game coach-massaging. But grimly dapping fans while leaving the floor after a Raptors loss as if he himself had just left it all out there, or cutting a postgame promo in which he cops the mannerisms of an exhausted player while dropping sub-Musburgerian chip-related wordplay? That’s some weird and dorky stuff for a famous and successful adult to do!
None of that measures up to the Horny Watch, though. Followers of Drake’s Instagram account will be familiar with the Horny Watch because, in what’s either a weird-and-dorky move or just a standard rich person flex, he has raved about it there.
When Drake wore this poetic watch to Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Monday night, the poetry on display was notably randier—“It would appear,” Complex’s Trace William Cowen wrote, “Drake went with... ‘I’d love to kiss your pussy.’” That is, he set up his watch such that this message would appear, and then put the watch on and went to the basketball game.
What kind of watch is this? I will break with our policies about naming brands because this is important: It is called a Richard Mille RM 69 Erotic Tourbillon, and it costs only $750,000. “Only 30 examples [of the horny watch] were made,” the style blog D’Marge writes, “as a tribute to the brand’s history of creativity.”
Here’s how this exquisite timepiece works:
As a tourbillon movement, The watch offers wearers a choice of intimate messages as the word bars rotate on the dial.
The top bar features changeable phrases like: “I want to”; “I need to”; “I long to”; “I lust to”; “I’d love to” and “Let me”
The middle bar joins it up with adjectives like: “explore”; “taste”; “kiss”; “arouse”; “devour”; and “caress”
And the bottom bar lights up the message with: “you tonight”; “your lips”; “your body”; “your nipples”; “your pussy”; and “you madly”
Get the combination right and it could read: “Let me devour your pussy”
Or, as Mille’s own promotional copy puts it, “Activated on request by pressing a button at 10 o’clock, [the horny watch’s random sex-phrase generator] plainly reveals the wearers’ deepest desires.” Terrific!
Is this indeed a fitting tribute to the Richard Mille brand’s history of creativity? That’s not for me to say, really, but I don’t see why not. Is this a good way to spend $750,000? I probably should stay out of that one, too, as I do not have $750,000, which makes it kind of academic whether I would or would not spend three-quarters of a million dollars on a watch that leers something about my nipples at me every time I look at it. If I am being honest, I would probably spend the money on something else—surely there’s an $875,000 watch that displays, on an otherwise useless digital display, the word TIDDIES. But, again, this is academic.
It’s academic because the horny watch belongs to Drake, as it was seemingly always destined to. By all means admire Drake for his accomplishments and his successes, which are all real. But remember that Drake has done all that he’s done while also being the sort of person who would own and wear the horny watch.