In 2008, Kanye West released 808s and Heartbreak. Though 808s was initially written off as Kanye buying into the vocoder trend that swept Hip-Hop around that time, most critics conceded that the album developed a unique aesthetic, with austere synths and metallic drums, that successfully conveyed Kanye's despair over his mother's death and the end of his longtime relationship with fiancee Alexis Phifer. 808s is considered Kanye's purest pop album, but at the time, it seemed decidedly uncommercial. Gone were most of the elements that made Kanye's first three albums so successful, the buoyant soul samples, enthusiastic choruses and infectious arrogance, replaced instead by introspection and alienation, accentuated by his amateurish, auto-tuned singing. It's Kanye's most personal record, and possibly his most affecting. The album was a commercial success, thanks to Kanye's star power and the strength of singles "Love Lockdown" and "Heartless." Everyone realized that the success of the record meant that people would buy whatever Kanye would sell, but nobody could have predicted that it would be the single most influential Hip-Hop album of the late 2000s.
Kid Cudi's Man On the Moon was the first mainstream rap debut to liberally crib from the 808s aesthetic, foregoing the more traditional Hip-Hop stylings of his mixtape in favor of half-sung, hazy drug ballads, that adopted the "woe is me" posturing of 808s without capturing the raw emotion. To be fair, Kid Cudi has real people problems. He suffers from depression and severe drug addiction and could easily have made the subject matter compelling if he weren't so insufferable. The most significant result of 808s influence was the rise of Drake, whose debut album Thank Me Later, owes its existence to the new genre Kanye inadvertently created. Producer and engineer Noah "40" Shebib cultivated a familiar metallic synth sound as a backdrop for Drake to whine about how awesome his life is. The overriding theme of Thank Me Later was, to put it simply, "fame, while often awesome, sometimes sucks." This is not a real person's problem. Poor Drake drinks expensive champagne and has sex with supermodels and Rihanna. Sure, it's lonely at the top, but there's probably a thousand more compelling themes to base an entire career around. Yeah, Kanye talks about this shit, too, but at least he waited three albums before he retreated into the cold depths of his inner soul. With Drake, all we see is the cold depths and there's nothing that we can relate to.
Drake's new, highly anticipated second album Take Care is more of the same, as Drake manages to talk about himself for 79 minutes without saying ANYTHING. After listening to both of Drake's albums, this is what I know about Drake:
1. He's a famous rapper. Because he is a famous rapper, he has a lot of money and bitches and knows Rick Ross.
2. Before he was a rapper, he was an actor in Canadian teen soap opera Degrassi where he played a wheelchair-bound character named Jimmy, who had actual problems unlike Drake.
3. Drake loves having sex with women, but sometimes feels bad about how many women he has sex with. He tries to make himself feel better by having sex with more women.
4. He loves to sing in a semi-compelling, monotonous over 40's beats that sometimes bang (see "Headlines, "I'm On One"), but usually just sound like Kenny G ("Doing It Wrong," indeed. There's a reason why nobody likes anything Stevie Wonder has done since "Ebony and Ivory")
5. His greatest skill is the ability for him to appear deep and introspective when he's really just selfish, arrogant and shallow, or maybe it's his ability to somehow make a song featuring both Lil Wayne and Andre 3000 incredibly boring.
I could have found out all of those things, except maybe number 5, by glancing at Drake's Wikipedia page. There is still a hell of a lot that I don't know about Drake. I don't anything about where he comes from. I mean, he talks about "his city," but never mentions Toronto by name. He never talks about his family, his (non-famous) friends, or his childhood unless he's trying to justify his vices. Honestly, Drake doesn't say anything that makes his entitled arrogance more palatable or makes me care about him as a human being. Take Care is one austere, overlong humblebrag ("Ugh, it sucks that I have sex with all these beautiful women")
Take "Marvin's Room," the lead single from the album. In "Marvin's Room," Drake drunk dials his nameless ex-girlfriend and complains that she could do better than the new guy she's dating (read: him) and basically brags to her about how he has sex with four women a week. Heartwarming. Everyone drunk dials, true, but Drake manages to spoil even his most vulnerable moments with his self-centeredness. "Marvin's Room" reeks of unearned hubris. He recorded the album in the same studio that Marvin Gaye recorded Here, My Dear, a classic breakup album, but he doesn't seem to understand that standing in the same place as Marvin Gaye does not make them artistic equals. Marvin had a beautiful, soulful voice, which is the polar opposite of Drake's flat, unfeeling croon. On "The Real Her," Drake further proves that he is a singularly boring, unemotional R&B singer, inspiring the least energetic verses in the careers of Andre 3000 and Lil Wayne.
The weakest moments of Take Care come when Drake enters his full-on R&B mode, but Drake can be fairly entertaining when he puts on his rapper face. "Look What You've Done" is the most honest track on the album and is the closest to showing where Drake comes from and why anyone should care about him in the first place. "Headlines," produced by 40 and Bo-1da, genuinely bangs, and Drake keeps his sensitive-guy posturing to a minimum. The best track on here is probably "Lord Knows," featuring Rick Ross, because Drake doesn't sing at all and just rides Just Blaze's old school, children's choir instrumental, dropping some clever lines in the process ("In this bitch all drinks on the house like Snoopy"). Then again, even on "Lord Knows," Drake's arrogance rears it's ugly head. Drake says "I don't make music for n****s who don't get pussy," as if the people who don't like his music are jealous of the quantity and quality of women he sleeps with. He compares himself to Marley and Hendrix, two universally beloved artists who forged their own spaces in music, by refining and perfecting a unique sound. Drake liberally borrows from 808s Kanye and his trademark "hashtag" flow has been around since the late 80s (listen to Ludacris if you don't believe me).
Actually, the best track on the album is the one track where Drake doesn't even show up. Kendrick Lamar's "Buried Alive (Interlude)" displays the MC's virtuosic skill and ability to pack more meaning and pathos into his short verse than Drake fits into his entire album. Kendrick's album, Section.80, shows how you can do the introspective thing right, by actually looking inward and learning about yourself and your generation. "Buried Alive" is tacked on to the end of "Marvin's Room," an interesting choice on Drake's part. "Buried Alive" illustrates a legitimate conflict created by the pursuit of fame. Kendrick must decide if he wants to leave his best friends from Compton behind and embrace his new famous friends. His image of fame as a coffin, with six feet separating you from the rest of the world, is evocative and exposes Drake's whining for what it is.
Whether or not you enjoy Take Care depends on if you buy Drake's schtick. There are some really interesting sonic elements in the production, especially on "Headlines" and "Lord Knows." The album is generally very well made and there's high production value throughout. I couldn't get past the fact that listening to Take Care means having to spend an hour and twenty minutes with Drake, who I find completely uninteresting. Maybe if Drake stopped navel-gazing and looked around he'd realize he wasn't the only person in the world, and maybe that other people's problems are more important than that one time he accidentally drunk-dialed his ex.
