“The one that I needed was Courtney from Hooter’s on Peachtree/I always felt like she was the piece to complete me/Now she engaged to be married what’s the rush on commitment?/We were going through shit name a couple that isn’t.” Rap isn’t the same as it was ten years ago. Hell, rap isn’t the same as it was in 2008, and the main reason for that can be traced back to one person: Aubrey Drake Graham. He took the foundation laid by Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak and took its ideas to their logical extreme, stripping away almost all notions of what was considered rap’s mainstream at that moment. He was sad, wide-eyed, confused and sappy, the exact opposite of what people thought it took to become a rap star. He knew stripper’s real names and cared about how they were getting home that night. On his debut album Thank Me Later, the leadoff track (“Fireworks”) employed Alicia Keys to sing the chorus of the song, which was about his breakup with Rihanna. And only a track later is “Karaoke,” sparse and sung, where he laments about how his fame is causing women to leave him. The second track. On his first album. Now, as Drake releases his third LP, Nothing Was the Same, he’s grown more confident with himself, and even more wary of everyone else. With Kanye vacating hip-hop’s throne to reside as an allegorical hermit on rap’s Mt. Olympus, and Jay-Z seemingly content to coast through every one of his music related ventures, Drake is more than content to swipe the throne that “is for the taking” as he threatened on last year’s “Stay Schemin’.”
However, that doesn’t mean he’s lost any of the sensitive, selfish persona he has cultivated since his breakthrough in 2008. Which takes us back to the first line of this review, from the seventh track on NWTS, the gorgeous, Jhene Aiko assisted “From Time.” It has all the hallmarks of a Drake song: the bitterness, the sadness, the girl’s real first name. Yes, there really is a Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree, and this single line made her put all of her social media on lockdown. Drake has done this before (“Cece’s/Bria’s Interlude”) but he’s never had such a wide audience for his pettiness. Instead of using his largest album to boast (“Started from the Bottom” nonwithstanding) or surround himself with friends in high places, he throws rocks from his high post at people who have no way to even the score. Does this make him a selfish jerk? Probably. Does that mean it’s bad music? Not in any way. Drake and his resident producer Noah “40” Shebib have made some of the most effortlessly beautiful music of any release this year, with Drake sharpening up his rapping skills to keep up. “Tuscan Leather,” the album’s opener, sees 40 flip a Whitney Houston sample over and over while Drake raps with no chorus for six minutes: “This ain’t nothing for the radio/but they still play it though/’Cause it’s that new Drizzy Drake/that’s just the way it go.” Twice through the song, the beat drops out and reinvents itself, effectively making this a three-part suite. The mid-song style changes are pervasive throughout the album, from the next track, “Furthest Thing,” to the stunningly melodic bonus track, “Come Thru.”
NWTS is an insular album, with Drake and 40 being the only two main contributors. There are nearly no features on the album, and two of them are from little-known R&B prodigies Sampha and Aiko. The other feature on the album is Jay-Z, the only name of note, and he serves little purpose beside having his name on the tracklist. He shows up on the last track “Pound Cake/Paris Morton Music 2” and delivers possibly the worst verse of his career, at one point rhyming “cake” with “cake” innumerable times, and also comparing the colour of his car to the whiteness of Katy Perry’s face. Drake absolutely runs him over, and sounds like he isn’t even trying at that. While Jay-Z is on the edge of being a has-been, Drake “just spent four Ferraris all on a brand new Bugatti and did that shit ‘cause it’s somethin’ to do.” He is alone on the top, makes sure he lets everyone knows that no one can touch him.
This brings us back to the songs, and all the underlying signatories which make this a Drake album. Much of the time he isn’t even rapping, he’s singing, he’s talking. He sings about much of the same things as he did on “Karaoke,” only this time he deserves to. On “Furthest Thing” he “hate[s] that you don’t think I belong to you/just too busy runnin’ shit to run home to you.” He tries his hand at some bragging, on the eerie and outstanding “Started from the Bottom,” as well as “Worst Behaviour.” But it doesn’t hold up upon close inspection, and the songs work because of 40’s outstanding production. The best song on the album may be the second last, the Sampha-assisted “Too Much.” Here, Drake is in full rap mode, reminiscing about his path to superstardom and the friend’s that he’s lost along the way. And then, in the second verse, he goes after his family, how they distanced themselves from him, how is his mother and his uncle have given up on their dreams. It’s Drake’s most personal song ever, and his most resonant as well. And that, I believe, is the underlying reason Drake has done so well in spite of all the criticism he faces. He creates music that people can relate to; despite the fact that his more famous than most of us will ever dream of. He’s still upset about that girl five years ago; who he thought was the one. He’s paranoid, like he’s always been, about his inability to form relationships and how his actions ruin them. He makes terrible decisions and is overcome by guilt. He loves his family, and yet they still let him down sometimes. Sometimes, he’s on top of the world, and others he can’t figure out how to release his demons. He’s relatable, complex, selfish, loving and vulnerable. He treats his records like windows into his mind, instead of just putting on a persona. He’s done something that very few other rap stars have managed, becoming a bona fide superstar by just being himself.
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