Drake Is Taking the Right Steps
In his new data dump on 100gigs.org, Drake releases a few new songs and gets back to the relatability that made him such a star.
One fact that was lost in the loss that Drake took in the beef with Kendrick Lamar was that his fifteen years at the top of the rap game was not an accident. Aubrey Drake Graham didn’t pay off any record labels; he didn’t have naked pictures of Lil Wayne’s genitals. All of the distinctive individuality that he possess — that he is just Black enough to say nigga and just Jewish to be so startlingly in touch with himself — was aided by his excellent craft. Hooks were as intricate as verses but as triumphant as championship parades. Tempo was tinkered with; flow could be a legato — quick but never in a hurry. Whenever he was emotionally complicated, he wrote about it, letting it linger despite oversharing. If he was feeling glorious, that was conveyed as with some of the finest production hip-hop had heard to that point. The new kid was weird — but he was around because he was undeniable.
What allowed Kendrick and his grumpy fraternity of mean boys doing their best Cady Heron impression to succeed was that Drake stopped delivering excellent music. The clout became addicting; the id was focused group; the misogyny went from compelling to grating. The verses lacked the amusing details of before; the songs stopped trying to bend style. They became tragically basic, a disappointing feature for an artist that was predicated on dynamic change and gothic lyrics.
It’s been a rough summer for the Toronto pop rap star. Kendrick Lamar exposed his complicated relationship with the hip-hop community, and the Black community at large. A certain professional male that was a former Drake fan fathered a few kids, got married, and now became a Kendrick fan. Those same people went to the Pop Out show on Juneteeth, cheered, and sang to a song that claims he might be a pedophile. It was undeniable. So, how do you plot your revenge? Do you keep going? No, hopefully Drake knows that it is the music, and smart fan service that can get people back to your good graces. The few songs, and intimate videos, released on his data dump on 100gigs.org are exactly what Drake needed to calm the booing from the opposition.
“It’s Up” opens with flair. It’s a bit of the old Drake, when a sentence as “this world has some real things dividing them” can become a rallying cry for your entire friend group for a full two months. (Who knows when this was recorded? But, in what is a very subtle reminder of Drake’s cosmopolitanism, he sings a line possibly talking about Isreal’s grotesque war in Gaza, and goes: “My right hand is Muslim, I’ll die for him”). It’s a banger, the kind of Drake song that would have come out in the middle of Take Care and Nothing Was the Same as a loosie, and it’s a welcome addition to the already canon playlist of loosies you made on your Spotify account.
There’s also “Blue Green Red”, which is a dance song at a rave in the Dominican Republic. He can’t be a “colonizer” when the music is this good, this whimsical and danceable. “Housekeeping Knows”, with Latto, is the least best of the bunch, but it’s an example of his longtime chemistry with female artists. It doesn’t stop with music, too: the data dump contains intimate videos of Drake recording music for the past ten years, some footage of him getting ready to perform on tour, and some videos of him playing with his son, Adonis. There is him telling his mom that “Too Good”, which features his former beau Rihanna, is about Serena Williams; there’s him recording the unheralded “6 Man”; there’s him linking up with Cam’ron; there’s even a Slick Rick appearance. (A favorite of mine: him dancing to Drakeo the Ruler’s “Impatient Freestyle”, showing Los Angeles and Kendrick Lamar that Drake has long been a supporter of Drakeo, a revolutionary L.A. artist).
This is Drake at his best: a Toronto kid with multi-cultured friends and taste, who is just content to make music dissecting himself and his eccentricities. Fans attached themselves to that. In the glow of wealth, status, and disconcerting fame, he might have forgotten what made him special in the first place. This was a move for the immediacy of fandom, the kind of communicating building and community bending that made him popular. Allow him to be that again.