None of these things are accidental, and the way Drake uses his own mockery to his advantage is nothing short of genius.Īll that aside, the thing Drake does best lies not in lyrics or in self-promotion, but in delivery. Forget for a second the tired Drake stereotypes the wonderfully terrible puns (“and my wifey a spice like David Beckham”), the moping self-pity juxtaposed with the over-glamorous bragging and of course, the inevitable “internet reactions”. But there’s still merit to the more introverted moments.ĭrake, like the Alfred Hitchcock of rap, is a master of suspense. Drawling, half-sung half-spoken tracks - with the monotonous filtered drum beats producer Noah “40” Shebib has made his name on - suddenly pander in the wake of the big hooks and choruses the likes of ‘Hotline Bling’ and ‘One Dance’ bring to the table. So massive are his singles - and so cleverly constructed are his albums and mixtapes for a generation with a famously short attention span - that the times when he operates on a wider scale and creates for himself, rather than for the internet and the charts, take some getting used to. It’s been a while since Drake has been able to exist successfully in the context of a whole album, rather than in dissected snippets and pull quotes.
It’s now both his greatest ally and worst enemy. To expect the same audience who had turned the ‘Views’ artwork into a meme within minutes to sit down and listen to 20 tracks of Drake’s inner workings is a big ask, but this is the critical mind-set Drake has curated around himself. A glance at a longer than average track-list, a half-listen to a few opening tracks, or one too many self-indulgent lines, is enough to break Drake, just as one hook can shoot him skywards. Such is the culture around Drake these days that as quickly as he can become a web omnipresence, he can be turned upon.
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