Materialism, as well as angst, looms large in Drake’s world. He almost puts us in the role of a priest taking confession, or at least a therapist.īut if we might, on the one hand, thank Drake for helping to shift hip-hop away from the guns, the violence, the overt misogyny of the gangsta rappers, how admirable are the things he replaces it with? We’re on the other side of the wall in fact we’re inside Drake’s head, right up against his conflicted thoughts. Musically the track is evocative the backing is like a sound system playing in the next room. “Why do I settle for women who force me to pick up the pieces? Why do I want an independent woman to feel like she needs me?” he moans rhetorically in ‘ Redemption’, a track that displays both the best and worst of Drake. And he continues as he begins for the 80-odd minutes of music that follow. In fact, his sensitivity borders on paranoia in ‘Keep the Family Close’, the album’s opening track, as he delivers in his Autotuned croon one of his typically curly melodies against a big moody orchestration. And, to a great extent, that’s still what he’s doing on this new disc. Drake may have draped himself in all the usual symbols of success – big cars, bling, sexual opportunites – and yet he was left with something resembling depression, which he gave voice to in disarmingly personal songs. But along with Kanye West’s ground-breaking 808s and Heartbreak, Drake’s Thank Me Later advanced the notion that the rapper could be vulnerable, could have doubts and insecurities and express these in a way that didn’t conform to the gangsta norm. When the former teen-television-star broke big with his 2010 debut, hip-hop was just emerging from a period of domination by self-styled sociopaths like Eminem or 50 Cent.
Which gets to heart of what is both most innovative and irritating about Drake. In Drake’s song – as in just about all of his songs – the chief subject is Drake, and the only injustice is the one being perpetrated against him by one or other ex-girlfriend. Of course the message of ‘Hotline Bling’ is somewhat less altruistic than that of the song on which it is based a profound and soulful plea for black civil rights. That hit appears as a kind of bonus track, right at the end of the new album. Still, anyone who can revive Timmy Thomas’s ‘Why Can’t We Live Together? while fashioning a whole new song from its 70s-home-keyboard hook at least gets points for sharing my tastes in vintage soul. Up until ‘Hotline Bling’, his big from last year, I did my best to resist. Which is not to say his music is to everyone’s tastes. His records, more than anyone else’s, dissolve the line between rapping and singing, shifting back and forth between melody and recitation, over backings that are mellow and seductive in the mode of early-90s R&B.
In many ways he has changed both the sound and content of the genre. In the seldom-static world of R&B and hip-hop, Canadian rapper and singer Drake is impossible to ignore.
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