at a shareholders’ meeting, confusing quantifiable success with unimpeachable artistry. He reels off his performance stats, like a C.F.O. Drake once rapped that the moment he stopped having fun playing the game he’d be done with it, but the fun is gone and it’s never been clearer that rapping is his job-the linchpin of his empire.ĭrake has enjoyed an unprecedented run for a rapper in the pop arena, but the cracks in his armor begin to show on “Certified Lover Boy.” No longer fuelled by proving exes and would-be soulmates wrong, he’s hyperfixated with being on top of the music world. Now, on songs such as “No Friends in the Industry” and “Fair Trade,” he is simply retreating from any interaction. He’d return from out of town to reinsert himself in an ex’s life, or he’d turn a regular lapdance into an impromptu therapy session. His songs were drunk voice mails and intimate, aired-out conversations and Mob-style sitdowns with competitors. booths, restaurants after hours, champagne rooms, dimly lit bedrooms, award-show afterparties. Even the best Drake projects sound morose and agitated, but they carried in them the stimulating energy of the dark, stirring spaces he was moving through-club V.I.P.
The album has all the signatures of a Drake album, but it’s utterly lacking in dynamism. “Certified Lover Boy” isn’t a regression it is stagnation. This perpetual petulance has left his music of opulence in crisis. In Drake’s estimation, acknowledging fault is the same as accepting a loss-something he refuses to even seriously consider. He is still prisoner to a myopic outlook. “I been hot since the birth of my son / I remain unphased, trust, worse has been done / Man, fuck evaluation, show me personal funds,” he taunts, seconds in to the album’s first track, “Champagne Poetry.” Becoming a dad seemingly hasn’t fostered any significant development in the now thirty-four-year-old rapper, or his music.
#Drake doing it wrong album free
Instead, his distressed new album, “Certified Lover Boy,” sidesteps these options entirely, opting to reassert the status quo-where Drake is not only free from reproach but invulnerable. He could finally move forward in his music, using it as a space to bring more to his story. He could embrace the challenges of raising a child and co-parenting with the mother. “Hopefully by the time you hear this / Me and your mother will have come around / Instead of always cuttin’ each other down.” Drake has spent his career disparaging lovers and ignoring accountability, but this seemed like a new turn. “This champagne toast is short-lived / I got an empty crib in my empty crib,” he rapped on “March 14,” a track that played like an open letter. In the wake of the rapper Pusha T’s accusation that Drake was hiding his kid, Toronto’s streaming giant was forced into a defensive position, grappling publicly with a messy, unresolved paternity situation. Drake’s 2018 album, “Scorpion,” ended with the begrudging acceptance of fatherhood.
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