367. Drake, "If You're Reading This It's Too Late"

 


Drake is one of the biggest artists of the 2010s (and will be for the 2020s, if he so wishes, I'm sure).  And yet - personal confession time here - I could not name a single Drake song.  He has just never been on my radar.  I mean, I know what he looks like, and we all know the meme, but I could not name a song.  Even after listening to this whole album, I still couldn't.

[LENGTHY PARENTHETICAL: I don't know any songs because, of course, I was listening to it on my device while walking around or whatever, the same way I, and probably most everybody, consumes music these days.  As a Gen Xer, I used to listen to music as a youth by putting on albums and then carefully studying the sleeve and liner notes as it played.  This way, I grew to know what each song was named.  Now, I barely look at my phone while music is playing so I almost never associate songs with names.  I barely know the names of any songs any more.]

So.  This album.  Now, although I had very little prior knowledge of Drake, I had a vague mental impression that he was a crooner type, like a sexxxy R&B kind of singer guy?  But this is straight-up rap, with very little instrumentation.  Drake is clearly trying to sound hard - there's lots of motherfuckas and stuff about getting fucked up and getting laid, but I actually LOL'd when I got to the line "I got two mortgages, thirty million in total," like oh man, your life must be rough, Drake.  This album has that thing a lot of artists have when they get big - they start singing and/or rapping about how much shit they have and how hard it is to be rich & famous.  This effect is so well known Joe Walsh parodied it in 1978, in "Life's Been Good" ("My Maserati does one-eighty-five/I lost my license, now I don't drive").

In the end, all the songs on this album sound about the same.  I would have  a tough time differentiating one from another unless I listened to this album a lot, which I will not do.  It's just cold.  The sound itself is sparse and cold, and it left me feeling cold, like Drake was playing a role he's not particularly suited for, or just complaining about a life most people will never glimpse.  I'm gonna pass on this one.

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