Drake - More Life
Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Drake
More Life
[OVO Sound/Young Money/Cash Money; 2017]
Rating: 4/5
A Playlist By October Firm: in which Drake adds to his already-expansive, fractured taxonomy of distribution methods (see: “retail mixtape”), and, by cooly recapturing the unfussy, dashed-off appeal of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and What a Time to Be Alive, he doubles down on the continuity and reflexiveness of his un-ending hot streak, thereby reaffirming his ascendency in the process. The album, in its cynical design and cascading cycle of hype, can’t contain Drake’s febrility, nor can it drain him of his energy. Indeed, Nineteen85 reckons that the playlist format isn’t a protracted hangover from VIEWS or a stopgap release, but instead the result of an abundance of “good ideas,” transmitted as such “without making it a big ordeal.” The Playlist is the anti-event, a testament to Drake’s consistency and workmanlike approach to his craft. He best articulates it himself: More Life means more chune for your headtop, you know?
Then again, as someone of Drake’s stature intimately knows, the anti-event is itself a signifier of ambition. Yeezus proved it, IYRTITL and WATTBA proved it. The lack of a real spectacle, as well as a performative quickness usually reserved for minor endeavors like freestyles or SoundCloud uploads, takes on its own critical edge, apropos of the rapid cultural flows facilitated by the internet. More Life had a relatively lengthy gestation period, arriving about three months after its initially speculated release date, and I get the sense that it’s more measured and crowd-sourced than either of Drake’s 2015 tapes — like, where’s “Sneakin’” at? — but its arrival as a “playlist” lends it less gravitas than the album-event, and offsets critical and commercial expectation somewhat (though, to be fair, he’s had no problem on either account). In the “playlist,” then, the locus of Drake’s branded identity undergoes an epistemic shift. His personality and ego remain, of course, but the new categorization posits Drake as an omnipresent aggregator of cultural capital — his “playlist” consolidates immediate and long-held influences alike, while enabling a more explicitly collaborative, porous modality than any previous endeavor has suggested. In short, More Life is Drake as curator.
This is not to suggest that Drake hasn’t already co-opted, or outright benefited from, the work of others. He’s always thrived on a network of contemporary sounds, be it a Gil Scott-Heron rework by Jamie xx, Just Blaze’s gospel choirs, or 40’s tried-and-true 808 ricochet. Still, for all the outside influences present in his earlier work, Drake nonetheless formulated a unique sound and perspective by the time IYRITL was rolled out, which TMTer SCVSCV characterized as a “consistency of vision that is tied to his ability to deliver an experience specific to himself.” He could fold as many other voices or producers into the alchemical smelting pot that constituted his sound, all the while sounding like nobody but himself. This is still a touchstone here, for sure, but the playlist is less an embodiment of the “experience,” Drake-playing-Drake via others, and more a headspace in which these voices, genres, and styles are given breathing room.
More Life’s curatorial outlook sees a further expansion of Drake’s sonic horizons, incorporating the usual Pan-American ingredients — trap kits via Atlanta, dancehall via Jamaica, etc. — alongside an appreciation for the UK’s grime scene and South African house, among others. Accordingly, the playlist runs the aural (and emotional) gamut across its 22 tracks, with stoic Drizzy bangers “Free Smoke” and “Gyalchester” slotting alongside contemplative, sad-boy posturing (“Nothings Into Somethings,” “Teenage Fever”) and ebullient reach (“Portland” featuring Quavo and Travis Scott, the Kanye link-up “Glow”). Drake even diverts course and vanishes entirely on a couple of tracks, “4422” and “Skepta Interlude:” on the former, it is Sampha’s multi-tracked voice that pierces the bleary apparition of an instrumental; on the latter, Skepta lurches into a quasi-grime track that might’ve figured nicely as an addendum to his own record, last year’s Konnichiwa.
Drake’s reticence to even show up is matched by a restrained easiness on the mic when he actually does. Never straying too far off-brand, he musters up a few provocative bars — he’s kissing his teeth here, taking a subtle dig at XXXtentacion there — but the overall performance is less terse than it was on VIEWS. “Free Smoke’s” willful boasting of Dom Rosé toasts and silk pajamas is gleefully inflected, eschewing Drake’s usual dourness; a lifestyle well-deserved, the come-up complete. Elsewhere, he’s open and honest, lamenting his fame on “Lose You:” “People like you more when you workin’ towards somethin’, not when you have it.” Of course, this is nothing new; Drake’s shtick has always been vested in the soft-hard, sing-rap dynamic. Nevertheless, this directness is a welcome return following VIEWS’s internally-coiled, shrink-wrapped angst, acknowledged as such on the final track: “I was an angry yute when I was writin’ VIEWS, saw a side of myself that I just never knew.” Plain admission aside, there’s a broad sense that More Life is a tacit mea culpa of sorts, a corrective to the icy distance elicited by his previous album. Drake re-establishes the critical connection by effortlessly cycling through the modes; we share in his joy, get all in our (his) feelings, and so on.
On the concept of the curatorial, Aneta Szylak proposes a system of contextual implication and interactivity that reciprocates those who are included in it, however peripheral they seem. There are elements of this in More Life: different cultural contexts and histories intermingle and play off one another, contributing to the grander schema of the playlist; the lesser-known artists get a heavily expanded outreach and a few extra streams to boot. Detractors might regard this curatorial bent as a coded gesture, a matter of bandwagon-hopping, wave-riding, or otherwise biting predominant or underground styles, in a bid for endless relevance. Yet Drake never once forsakes the self-reflexive, paradoxical ego that made him interesting and engaging to begin with, and in the genealogy of Drake releases, this playlist has more in common with the varied, outward-looking bounce of Take Care than VIEWS’s wearisome opulence, and that can only be a good thing. For a moment, maybe he did lose us, outpaced by self-perpetuated hype and lost in rebounding streams of content. Thankfully, More Life is Drizzy’s homecoming, a vocalization of the heart in his heartless world, and a veritable return to form for it. Welcome back to the Firm.
Pitchfork 78
Drake’s VIEWS was a commercial pinnacle and a creative and personal dead end. He scored the biggest hit of his career with “One Dance,” but the album surrounding it was so aggrieved and solipsistic you felt like you were insulting Drake by listening to it. His telepathic bond with producer Noah “40” Shebib had turned stale and over its punishing 80-plus minutes he wrung every last drop of sour grapes from his Beta-Male Conqueror persona. He had crushed his frenemies, seen them driven before him, and heard the lamentations of their women—or at least purposefully ignored their texts. What was next but exile?
He seems to be tacitly admitting to this stagnation throughout the warm, pulsing, and generous More Life. His solution is a “Playlist” (not a big old serious Album, the implication goes, nor one of those little “mixtapes” other rappers bother with) that forces Drake out into the sunlight again, where he can once again mingle with the people. On More Life’s closing track “Do Not Disturb,” he acknowledges the bleak spot he was in: “I was an angry youth while I was writing VIEWS/Saw a side of myself that I just never knew.” He even lets his mother pipe in with a voice message two-thirds of the way through the record on “Can’t Have Everything” as she admonishes her son for the hostile, suspicious streak he was nurturing. “That attitude will just hold you back in this life, and you’re going to continue to feel alienated,” she advises.
He doesn’t exactly drop the attitude, but he does play the background on More Life, implicitly acknowledging that he is often the least appealing element of his massively successful art. Dialing back on his self-pity allows all his skills that have kept him on top to float back to the surface: his ear for melodies, his sophisticated tastes, his curation skills. The more voices he lets into the frame, the fuller and richer the results, and More Life bursts with energy and lush sounds—more guests, more genres, more producers, more life. It is as confident, relaxed, and appealing as he’s sounded in a couple of years.
Drake steps back and lets the dusky-voiced 19-year-old British singer Jorja Smith soar over a sinuous club track from the rising South African house producer Black Coffee on the gorgeous “Get It Together.” Black Coffee and Jorja comprise at least 80 percent of the song; Drake is mostly relegated to mumbling or doubling the hook. Sampha bleeds his gorgeous hurt over the entirety of “4422,” with no one else in sight, and Skepta claims an entire track, boasting that he “died and came back as Fela Kuti.” Young Thug steals not one but two songs, spitting a dense verse with no vocal filter on “Sacrifices” and yelping along with the roots-reggae horns of “Ice Melts.”
Throughout, Drake’s appetite for the music of other cultures remains ravenous. “I switch flow like I switch time zone,” he raps on “Gyalchester,” the song title itself a patois nickname for the neighborhood of Manchester. On “Sacrifices,” he boasts “I got Dubai plates in the California state.” In both reach and sound, Drake may now be one of the most global pop stars in history. He is shrewd and relentless about his globe-trotting on More Life: “Dis a habibis ting, yeah?” he asks on the intro to a track called “Portland,” invoking a vivid zone of confusion where Arabic and Caribbean slang collides with Atlanta’s own Quavo somewhere in the rainy Pacific Northwest.
As always, there are moments when it’s unclear what Drake thinks he is borrowing. He tackles “No Long Talk” in an unsteady tough-guy patois—“things” turns to “tings” but then sneaks back into “things” when he’s not watching it, so he sounds a bit more like a kid with a hairbrush in the mirror than he probably intends. He also proudly shouts out his bodyguard Baka Not Nice, a man who faced human trafficking charges and was imprisoned on domestic assault charges (Drake boasts that Baka’s “quick to let a motherfuckin’ TEC slam”). It’s a reminder of his unsavory tendency to borrow street credibility from figures like Baka who have paid the price for it, the same impulse that had him pointing to a “prison visit” on his song “Two Birds, One Stone” as evidence that he wasn’t some “privileged kid.” Who stunts about visiting a prison?
As one of the first rap superstars forged entirely outside the crucible of the American drug war, Drake has always had a confused relationship to the “rules” of hip-hop. This makes his moments of flexing interesting if only for the friction they generate between the role he’s assuming and the figure he cuts. He opens More Life with “Free Smoke,” a hard-charging and take-no-prisoners track, the sort of moment on a rap album where you ruthlessly cut down challengers and re-establish your dominance. But he spends it remembering how he used to eat Applebee’s and Outback, or the time he drunk-texted J. Lo (“It was an old number so it bounced back”). He does address his disgraced foe Meek Mill, who fell on a sword trying to expose Drake as a fraud: "How you let the kid fighting ghostwriting rumors turn you to a ghost?” he taunts. This is a peculiarly self-skewering line of attack, a bit like punching yourself in the face before going for your opponent’s gut. It doesn’t exactly elicit the classic, crowd-of-bystanders “ooooh!” that direct shots are supposed to incite; more of a “uh...hmmm.”
This pluralistic and self-contradicting identity has always been part and parcel of Drake’s inheritance to hip-hop; it will be a large part of his legacy. Name a pop star who has ever had a clearer picture of their place in the culture, who senses exactly what they can get away with and what they can’t (other than Taylor Swift). He knows himself and his worth, at least as a market entity. “They don’t know they gotta be faster than me to get to me, no one’s done it successfully,” he boasts, truthfully, on “Do Not Disturb.” More than anything, More Life plays like a just-in-time course correction to the excesses of VIEWS, a remarkable feat of troubleshooting that assures that October’s Very Own—whose catalog passed 10 billion Spotify streams before this release—continues to own several Octobers henceforth.
More Life is long, for sure. It is, of course, designed to be long, to swallow up all of your streaming bandwidth. Twenty-two songs all but asks you forget other rappers and musicians exist for a while. This is the new power play in an age of digital infinitude. He doesn’t offer insight in return, really—eight years into examining the wages of his success, he’s still stumbling on thoughts like, “How you run out of gas on the road to riches?” and, “Winning is problematic” as if they are actual epiphanies. But he does offer immersion. When everything is just right—the mood, the lighting, the production, the melody—that immersion feels total, and it’s hard to imagine wanting to be anywhere else. The gorgeous “Since Way Back” stretches the beat way out, the silences in between yawning wide open so you momentarily lose all sense of time and momentum. It stops the album dead in the best way possible. This is the Drake moment, when you exist inside the bubble of a single drunken thought, where all priorities bend like light through a water glass and you find yourself hanging on your phone, watching the twinkling ellipsis of a responding text message like it’s the answer to all of your prayers.
Wed Mar 22 05:00:00 GMT 2017Drowned In Sound 70
Purely as a rapper, Drake has perhaps never been less compelling than he is on More Life, his latest project – technically billed as a playlist - which clocks in at a behemoth 22 tracks and 82 minutes. Views was similarly overlong, doubling as both his most commercially successful and least compelling album, but while it’s understandable to be hesitant about another dancehall and grime-tinged Drake release less than a year later, he smartly uses this looser format to take somewhat of a backseat and showcase more a understanding of the former while still clinging to his awkward love of the latter.
The album’s titular credo is an ode to continued success and celebration in the face of adversity that is so vaguely grandiose and oft repeated it feels cribbed from a DJ Khaled on an elliptical. The pure rap songs, including opener ‘Free Smoke,’ feel like the equivalent of a Drake reduction sauce. ‘Free Smoke’ includes his late-night Tumblr-esque overshares (“I drunk text J-Lo/Old number so it bounce back”), grandiose brags (“I took the team plane from Oracle”), and rap come-up-isms (“Used to get paid for shows and front-door money / Five, ten, twenties, hand sanitise after you count that”) in no particular order and forming no logical narrative. The beat is tinny, and tiny, the scrawny younger sibling of the guttural production that characterized If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.
‘Gyalchester’ has a few boasts that land with the intended impact, but the success rate is lower than some of Drake’s shit-talk master classes like Nothing Was the Same’s ‘Tuscan Leather’ or Take Care’s ‘We’ll Be Fine.’ On ‘Portland’ and ‘Sacrifices’ he’s outdone by Quavo, 2 Chainz, and Young Thug, the latter of whom packs so many similes into his 46-bar verse that connecting them all would require a Rust Cohle-style string theory board.
And yet, at what could be the moment of Drake’s complete undressing, Skepta’s incendiary interlude, he smartly borrows a play from his mentor Lil Wayne (on the Andre 3000 and Tech N9ne featuring interlude from Tha Carter IV and removes himself from the picture entirely. It’s one of a number of moments on More Life where Drake shows more commitment to creating a mood than being the star of every song.
A major reason ‘One Dance’ wound up being among Drake’s biggest hits is that he finally seemed to understand when to get out of the way of a killer, infectious instrumental. There are several tracks on More Life where the production is so narcotising that the songs could easily reach the same stratospheric peak, and Drake smartly shows the same restraint. ‘Madiba Riddim’ has infectious claps and breezy guitar that are textbook summer smash, and ‘Get It Together’ blends soulful, jazzy piano and dancehall-meets-deep house drums to create a perfect vehicle for rising singer Jorja Smith, with Drake admirably (and uncharacteristically) playing second fiddle. Sampha’s ‘4422’ is a bit of a square peg with its slow 808 slap, but there’s no denying its quality.
While Drake’s dancehall infatuation has led to much critical discussion over whether it’s simply artistic curiosity or cultural appropriation, it’s hard to deny that style is a better fit for his vocal talents in 2017 than the tough-guy grime persona he adopts on tracks like the aforementioned ‘Gyalchester,’ as well as ‘No Long Talk,’ and ‘KMT.’ The speedy rat-a-tat style and shorter bars don’t give Drake room to do anything but puff out his chest, and he’s always been better at crafting unique melodies than unique rap cadences. Even though ‘Fake Love’ is as lyrically on-the-nose as it gets, Drake does a better job capturing his current mind state in the track’s unhinged hook and shortened verses than he does on many of the album’s pure rap cuts.
The sequencing on More Life feels far less deliberate than previous Drake records. An introspective track like ‘Lose You’ belongs in the same slot as album previous end credit songs such as ‘Thank Me Now,’ ‘The Ride,’ and even ‘Jungle’ and ‘Paris Morton Music 2,’ which fill the same role despite being followed by bonus tracks. Here, it’s thrown between two empty calorie records in ‘KMT’ and ‘Can’t Have Everything,’ diminishing its impact. The actual closer, 'Do Not Disturb', benefits from a choice sample of Snoh Aalegra’s “Time,” but lyrically it doesn’t cut as deep as some of its predecessors, or ‘Lose You’ for that matter.
Ultimately, More Life does a terrific job creating a mood with its dancehall-flecked, atmospheric production (handled most impressively by the likes of Nineteen85 and Frank Dukes), and it certainly points to a fascinating fork in the road moment for the world’s biggest rapper. He could continue to prioritise making quality pop tunes in which he may actually play an increasingly smaller role, or he could slap on a black tracksuit and make an uninspiring grime record where he apes all of the genre’s rising talent instead of giving them the spotlight they deserve. He shows enough musical self-awareness and maturation on More Life that it’s fair to be cautiously optimistic for the former, though with Drake half the fun is not knowing whether he’s aware enough to do what’s in his own musical (or personal) best interests.
Wed Mar 29 10:09:07 GMT 2017The Guardian 60
(Island)
Billed as “A Playlist by October Firm”, these 22 tracks of new music from Drake and guests reflect the desire of a big hitter – who “keeps the lights on in the building” (Can’t Have Everything) – to put out an album without industry song and dance. Cohesion is not vital, so grime MCs such as Skepta (Skepta Interlude), UK “road rap” proponents like Giggs (duetting on No Long Talk, grandstanding on KMT) and a South African producer called Black Coffee on the excellent Get It Together (feat Jorja Smith) sit alongside sweeter-sounding tropical pop cuts. Quite what Nelson Mandela has to do with Madiba Riddim, an archetypal Drake rhyme about not trusting anyone, is a moot point though. By definition, More Life has sprawl in-built, so judicious use of the skip function is required, but this is high-quality filler.
Continue reading... Sun Mar 26 08:00:25 GMT 2017