By Taylor Drake
Printed March 11th, 2015 by The Clipper
A very heavy love affair takes place when you put R&B inside a rapper with a chip on his shoulder, the crooning can turn into a sharp subliminal. On Feb.13. Drake released an album/mixtape called “If Your Reading This Then It’s Too Late”.
Drake, a rapper/singer from Toronto, Canada who came to fame with 3 mix tapes over the course of 4 years: “Room for improvement” (2006), “Comeback Season” (2007) and “So Far Gone”(2009). He then signed to Lil Wayne’s Young Money Entertainment label, confirmed on June 29, 2009 and released his debut, “Thank Me Later” the next year. He has 4 albums under his belt now that he has this recent album that seemingly fell out of the sky with no promotion, and managed to go gold within 2 days of being out. It also broke Spotify records and had an immense Billboard chart presence.
When Drake is at his best he is a flashy punch line rapper with some lines that stand out. For example, on the track “6 Man” he said
“I’m on it, I’m MacGyver, I’m Michael Myers,
I kill careers and cut the lights off,
this shit is frightenin’,
I knew it would end up like this,
I’m fuckin’ psychic,”
Or, when he managed to diss former label mate Tyga on the song “6PM in New York”, calling him a “little little homie” and saying that he needs to act his age and not his girl’s age, because of the rumor that Tyga is allegedly dating Kylie Jenner who is 17 and he’s 25. You can taste the ether when Drake said that line.
Drake sings with a nice smooth tempo that is able to truly reach the depth of sadness and passion that he wants you to hear, the best example of this is “Jungle”, which features a great sample
from the song “6 8” by Gabriel Garzon-Montano.
But there are some moments where he messes up with his content. On the song “Energy”, he says,
” I got bitches asking about the code to the Wi-Fi,
so they can talk about they friends,
just to tell me they aint really friends,” Wow!
In the song “Madonna” Drake does this mumble-rap chorus that takes up a sizable amount of the short song, it didn’t seem worth listening to.
When it comes to production, the album is filled with well layered and atmospheric instrumentals, putting the listener in the mood of the song as well as beats with banging kick drums and high hat combinations with a fluent instrumental attached to it. On the 10th track “Wednesday Night Interlude” featuring PARTYNEXTDOOR, PARTYNEXTDOOR’s singing has an echo to it, which indicates that he is alone, pulling the theme of being lonely together. Beautiful ghost voices are floating around the loop, indicating that someone was there at one point.
The only beat that needs to be sent to ST.Elsewhere is the track before “Wednesday Night Interlude” called “Preach”, the beat is this annoying, generic club junk, and PND’s autotune singing was wack. Don’t say you are or are about to preach and then not say anything or something that is less witty than a fart. Though I do think it’s a good idea to put this track before “Wednesday” because it feels like PND was probably drunk and high on Preach and is coming down from the high on the next track.
Lil Wayne is on the track “Used To”, he gives a pretty coherent verse, though he does say “Suck a nigga dick for an iPhone 6,” he doesn’t say if it’s him or a girl who is doing the fellating. Travis Scott, who did a great job being 1/3 of the production on the song “Company”, but he forgets to do that one thing in rap that makes it a rap, you know… rhyme, and he could have done that instead of trying to rhyme the same word.
I hope that Drake is able to stay away from Nastradamusing himself like Escobar or seeking out Tha Doggfather in the next project.
I give “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late” 6 Grammy nominations out of 10, it’ll probably lose to a white rapper.